[Athen] [EXTERNAL] athen-list Digest, Vol 228, Issue 15

[Vanessa Garza via athen-list]

We ask faculty to share a list of the readings and where they are located with students as soon as the course starts. We also try to email all faculty with students who need alt format at the beginning of each semester and let them know they need to send us the files ASAP.



Vanessa Garza (she, her)

Learning Experience Accessibility Specialist

Teaching, Learning, & Digital Transformation

The University of Texas at San Antonio
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Today's Topics:

   1. Thoughts about inaccessible PDFS in Canvas courses
      (Deborah Armstrong via athen-list)
   2. Re: Thoughts about inaccessible PDFS in Canvas courses
      (Susan Kelmer via athen-list)


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Message: 1
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2025 21:16:01 +0000
From: Deborah Armstrong via athen-list <athen-list at u.washington.edu>
To: 'Access Technology Higher Education Network'
        <athen-list at u.washington.edu>
Subject: [Athen] Thoughts about inaccessible PDFS in Canvas courses
Message-ID:
        <DM6PR10MB3370219AC48F7FC297413DDAB1E32 at DM6PR10MB3370.namprd10.prod.outlook.com>

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

This quarter, I've had a number of students with this problem, and I wonder how much is the responsibility of the disabled student services, and how much the professor's responsibility.
Your thoughts are welcome.
The course is in Canvas and I've had five students taking five different courses with this same issue. The Canvas platform itself is very accessible and the Canvas pages the teachers post are also quite accessible.
But for the course readings, what are posted are pages from a variety of textbooks, all scanned by the professors and presented as image-only PDF files.
I've been steadily converting them as students send them to me, but unlike traditional alternate media, where the student can request a textbook early, these inaccessible PDFS keep popping up a day or so before the student is supposed to have read them.
All of them are relatively short, and I am sure it is saving students money not having to buy textbooks, but instead to have material from a huge variety of books as part of their course.
But it's a nightmare for the poor student who doesn't know if the material he will get will be accessible until almost before it is due. Plus it's a hassle for alt media production.
I've talked to the person here who trains folks on Canvas and he knows a lot about accessibility. But right now they are focusing on something called RSI (regular and substantive interaction) in courses because apparently California law is requiring professors master this stuff. So accessibility he told me is on the back burner until they get through all the RSI training.
When is it our responsibility to make materials accessible, and when is it the professor's responsibility? And what have you done to shove some of that responsibility back to the teacher?
--Debee

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Message: 2
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2025 21:36:36 +0000
From: Susan Kelmer via athen-list <athen-list at u.washington.edu>
To: Deborah Armstrong <armstrongdeborah at fhda.edu>, Access Technology
        Higher  Education Network <athen-list at u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Athen] Thoughts about inaccessible PDFS in Canvas
        courses
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        <SA3PR03MB74890BD54D6CA5B1F075EA7DFBE32 at SA3PR03MB7489.namprd03.prod.outlook.com>

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It is the University's responsibility, bottom line.  It depends on your campus's policies on whether instructors are tasked with providing accessible documents or not, and if there is any enforcement mechanism to make faculty actually do that work.

We as DS professionals have the experience and know-how, but faculty often don't.  While in a perfect world everything would come already accessible, we know that isn't the case. And even if the vast majority of PDFs came in an accessible format, we'd still have those students that cannot utilize a PDF in the first place, no matter how accessible it is.

Several things come to mind for your problem, Debbee, and this is how we've solved them.


  1.  Provide students with a high-quality text to speech program that runs a scan and OCR of any material fed to it.  Of course I'm talking about Kurzweil and Texthelp.  If your campus is not doing this, they need to be.  Most image-only PDFs process just fine in these text-to-speech readers, and this should serve the vast majority of your sighted reading-disabled student population.
  2.  Remind students that letting us know about inaccessible materials in plenty of time for us to remediate the documents is their responsibility.  Most faculty have all of their materials uploaded for the semester early on.  It is the rare faculty who is feeding out things week by week.  Students should be looking ahead at reading materials, opening in their text-to-speech program, and if they don't work, send them in for remediation.  Give them a set amount of time needed for the production of these things.  Our set time is a four-day turnaround.  I usually don't need a full four days, but it can be a volume issue and having that four days helps me prioritize and get things done on time for the student.
  3.  For instructors who are feeding out materials too late for them to be remediated, a friendly reminder to them about your policies on alternate format production and the lead time you need can be helpful.  You also should be teaching your students to advocate for their needs with their instructors.  This is an interactive process, and students need to learn to speak with professors and explain clearly what their needs are, what the parameters are, etc.  They are the person closest to the instructor.  We can step in if a professor reacts poorly or appears to not understand the assignment (as the kids say these days).
  4.  You can also inform select instructors, primarily the violators, about how to look for better quality PDFs online, so that those base materials end up being much better quality, and you may not need to remediate them at all.
  5.  For things that look like they were scanned from a textbook, if you can figure out what the textbook is, you may be able to find nice clean copies by requesting them yourself from the publisher, or finding them on Bookshare.  I do this if I see a pattern in scans - like several things are called "Smith" followed by whatever part of the book it is.  Getting good clean working copies can really cut down on production time.  Sometimes, what you get from a publisher or Bookshare is almost ready to hand to a student, when it is just a chapter or two or three.  I produce those materials just like I produce textbook materials, I'm just not giving the student the entire book.

Hopefully this help.  While we'd love it if faculty were more mindful, generally, campuses have no enforcement power over faculty to make them do the right thing.  Which is why we all still have jobs, and why we also have quite a bit of job security, as annoying as the work can be sometimes.

Susan Kelmer
Alternate Format Production Program Manager
Disability Services
Health and Wellness Services
T 303 735 4836
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From: athen-list <athen-list-bounces at mailman12.u.washington.edu> On Behalf Of Deborah Armstrong via athen-list
Sent: Friday, January 24, 2025 2:16 PM
To: 'Access Technology Higher Education Network' <athen-list at u.washington.edu>
Subject: [Athen] Thoughts about inaccessible PDFS in Canvas courses

[External email - use caution]

This quarter, I've had a number of students with this problem, and I wonder how much is the responsibility of the disabled student services, and how much the professor's responsibility.
Your thoughts are welcome.
The course is in Canvas and I've had five students taking five different courses with this same issue. The Canvas platform itself is very accessible and the Canvas pages the teachers post are also quite accessible.
But for the course readings, what are posted are pages from a variety of textbooks, all scanned by the professors and presented as image-only PDF files.
I've been steadily converting them as students send them to me, but unlike traditional alternate media, where the student can request a textbook early, these inaccessible PDFS keep popping up a day or so before the student is supposed to have read them.
All of them are relatively short, and I am sure it is saving students money not having to buy textbooks, but instead to have material from a huge variety of books as part of their course.
But it's a nightmare for the poor student who doesn't know if the material he will get will be accessible until almost before it is due. Plus it's a hassle for alt media production.
I've talked to the person here who trains folks on Canvas and he knows a lot about accessibility. But right now they are focusing on something called RSI (regular and substantive interaction) in courses because apparently California law is requiring professors master this stuff. So accessibility he told me is on the back burner until they get through all the RSI training.
When is it our responsibility to make materials accessible, and when is it the professor's responsibility? And what have you done to shove some of that responsibility back to the teacher?
--Debee

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