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Accessibility Matters! Get involved in Global Accessibility Awareness Day - 18 May 2023

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Making digital content as accessible as possible has a real impact on the experience of staff and students, allowing them to engage, learn and teach effectively.

As we approach Thursday 18 May, when we will be marking Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) 2023, we are asking colleagues to consider the accessibility of their digital content and to make changes where possible, to improve the digital experience for all staff and students across the institution.

 In this article:

Fix Your Content Day 2023

 

As part of the University's commitment to digital access and inclusion and GAAD 2023, we will be taking part in Fix Your Content Day on 18 May. This is a global 24-hour competition for colleges and universities, hosted by Anthology, which aims to encourage the creation of more accessible and inclusive digital learning content through use of the Anthology Ally product, which is embedded in Minerva.

Colleagues in professional services can also get involved, as our 2023 activity has been expanded to encourage digital accessibility improvements across all University websites and public digital documents.

Accessible online and digital resources starts with design. We need to know how our learning experiences are received by our student population and how choice of access supports their requirements. I encourage you to ‘fix your content’ as part of this initiative; however, more importantly, we will not have to fix the content in the future if we design it with accessibility in mind from the beginning.

Dr Margaret Korosec, Dean: Online and Digital Education

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How educators can get involved

We know that you’re making every effort all year round within your local areas to improve accessibility for both staff and students, but you can help focus your efforts by getting involved in Fix Your Content Day by clicking the accessibility indicators in your course in Ally on 18 May and making the suggested accessibility improvements.

Ally is built into Minerva and helps staff understand the accessibility of files in their modules via simple green/red/amber indicators and helpful advice. Green is the goal, but improvement is what counts!

You could make changes such as:

  • Adding alt text to images directly through Ally
  • Fixing heading issues in Word documents
  • Replace scanned PDFs by downloading an OCRed PDF from Ally’s alternative formats to boost your score

Each fix is logged per institution in a live league table hosted by Anthology on the day – so you can see how the University of Leeds fares in real time!

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How professional services can get involved

We’re not expecting site and content owners to fix every issue in their websites or digital documents on 18 May – just fixing one or two problems on every page can make a big difference. Even if you know you’ll be busy on this day or even miss the date, making these changes before or after the day will mean that more people can engage with your content.

The Digital Accessibility site is full of checklists that make what can seem like a daunting task that much easier. Pick the right checklist based on the type of content you’d like to improve and simply work through it:

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What you can do now

  • Start to think about your own content (where applicable) and what changes can be made – small changes such as adding alt text to images directly through Anthology Ally is a great example
  • Faculty and school drop-in sessions and one-to-one support will be advertised in the approach to Fix Your Content Day, so do get in touch with your Faculty Learning Technologists and your School Academic Leads for Inclusive Pedagogies (SALIPs) about available opportunities
  • For website and digital document owners, IT will also be running drop-in sessions where you can get direct advice about the best way to remediate your content. The Digital Accessibility site will advertise dates and details in the coming weeks.

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Updating your 2023/24 Minerva Modules

Minerva modules for 2023/24 will be made available to staff in early June, to provide as much time as possible for areas to be built before teaching begins in October. Due to technical challenges, and to encourage the annual review of teaching content and provide the best student experience, content will not be automatically copied from the previous instance of a module. Copy tools make it easy to reuse material from previous years, particularly 2022/23 modules, which are already being delivered in Ultra Course View. Support and guidance will be available from June to help you with the copying process.

By taking part in Fix Your Content Day, you can start to look at your module areas and consider what changes you may want to make prior to the 2023/24 academic year.

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