Ros, hello.
On 27 Apr 2022, at 11:35, Ros Walker wrote:
> For St Andrews, I have developed an ‘Academic Model of Accessibility’. This is very new and I am still working through to a final version, but given the discussion here, it seems like an appropriate moment to share my thinking. I would very much welcome your comments. I am happy to badge this as Creative Commons once we have a final version.
This is a very interesting and valuable document -- thanks for posting it.
With any such document, my first thought is 'what does it say about STEM?' because STEM is always hard, in accessibility terms. There's quite a lot of variation between different STEM subjects; some will be a lot easier to handle than others.
The problem, as I'm sure you will be aware, is that the material distributed to students (in my part of the STEM forest) is primarily PDF and Powerpoint (and a decent fraction of even the slide-decks are PDFs rather than powerpoint), and PDF is, as you note, very hard to make accessible. PDF produced by LaTeX should get better in the next few years, but currently it's pretty much a dead loss. I have some notes on this elsewhere [1], but the conclusion I've come to is that yes, I can do A and B and hack my Blackboard Ally scores up a bit, but it's not clear that I'm achieving much that is practically worthwhile by doing so.
There is good advice available [2, 3, 4], but I think it's important to acknowledge that the things one can do here are usually expensive in time, and so are probably going to be pursued beyond box-ticking only by enthusiasts who may or may not act as evangelists for the effort amongst their colleagues.
I think it's quite easy for STEM folk to conclude 'there's not much we can practically do', and give up trying to do more than the obvious things (image captions; it might be possible to get some alt-text in there). This is something of a counsel of despair, but in talking to colleagues I have few current, _low-effort_ alternatives to suggest, and in a document such as this it might be useful to acknowledge that, if only so that STEM folk don't feel they've simply been forgotten about.
I don't know if others on the list are less pessimistic about this than I am.
Best wishes,
Norman
[1] https://text.nxg.me.uk/2021/3
[2] https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/digitalaccessibility/stemsubjects/
[3] https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/digital-education/2021/03/07/once-more-accessible-documents-from-latex/
[4] https://xerte.york.ac.uk/play.php?template_id=2036#Home or http://bit.ly/eaccess-equations2
--
Norman Gray : https://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/it/
Research IT Coordinator, School of Physics and Astronomy
(Spring 2022: I expect to be on campus Mondays and Thursdays)
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