[Athen] Ally for digital STEM course content

[Lilian Joy]

To reinforce what Matt has said, at the moment, Ally is not parsing
mathematical content well.
Different universities in the UK are using different approaches for their
staff who produce documents with LaTeX: Accessibility Resources for STEM by
university
<https://github.com/A11yMaths/AccessibilityResources/wiki/Resources-by-University>
by the Jisc A11yMaths group.
At the Uni of York, our lecturers are ensuring they have created the most
accessible LaTeX files possible so they output PDFs with structure, alt
text or figure captions, and meaningful hyperlinks. Using pandoc and
tex2html, they can then create alternative formats easily and they are
encouraged to upload both the PDF and an alternative format like HTML. In
other words, we're not relying on Ally to create the alternative format for
STEM content.
To be clear, no matter how 'accessible' a PDF file is, the maths in it is
not accessible to assistive technologies at the moment. This may change in
the future.
Hence the need to start with a good workflow where the original file is in
a good state so alternative formats can easily be created from it.
Hope that helps.
Regards
*Lilian*

Lilian Joy
Educational Adviser
Tel: 01904 321177
@uoy_tel <https://twitter.com/uoy_tel>  | PDLT site
<https://elearningyork.wordpress.com/> | Digital Accessibility site
<https://www.york.ac.uk/about/equality/accessibility/digital-accessibility/>
 | My presentations and posts
<https://elearningyork.wpcomstaging.com/about/lilian-soon/>
Programme Design and Learning Technology Team
Email disclaimer
<https://www.york.ac.uk/about/legal-statements/email-disclaimer/>


On Tue, 22 Nov 2022 at 06:38, Matthew Deeprose <M.Deeprose at soton.ac.uk>
wrote:


> In my experience, Ally doesn’t offer much for STEM out of the box.

>

>

>

> For example it won’t render content created using the Microsoft Equation

> editor at all, it just ignores it and doesn’t reproduce it in its alternate

> formats.

>

>

>

> And in cases where you use superscript or subscript in standard text, for

> example kW = 103 W, Ally will render it as  kW = 103 W in its alternative

> formats.

>

>

>

> We’re working on creating a workflow to prepare files for example from a

> tex/Latex source into a format which will then perform well with Ally’s

> alternative formats.

>

>

>

> Matt

>

>

>

> *From:* athen-list <athen-list-bounces at mailman12.u.washington.edu> *On

> Behalf Of *Patrick McCue

> *Sent:* 21 November 2022 16:24

> *To:* athen-list at u.washington.edu

> *Subject:* [Athen] Ally for digital STEM course content

>

>

>

> *CAUTION:* This e-mail originated outside the University of Southampton.

>

> Hello,

>

>

>

> We are considering implementing Ally to assist us with monitoring and

> improvement of digital course content.  We've had a chance to test the tool

> in a test environment but would love to hear from universities who use Ally

> specifically on how it performs with STEM content.  For example, have you

> used it successfully to make math or engineering content accessible to

> screen reader users?  Or does that type of content still require

> significant human intervention in most cases to be made accessible?

>

> Thanks!

>

>

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