 and the session should be recording now. So here's our agenda for today. Basically what we're hoping that you'll leave with is an introduction to why accessibility is important for both learners, but as well as for the OER community. We hope that you'll take in some considerations for designing accessible and open educational resources. And then finally, we hope that you have an understanding of where to find support and resources as you go about creating your own materials going forward. But before we dive into that, we'd like to have a little bit of knowledge about you. So what knowledge about accessibility do you bring with you? And are there anything specifically that you would like to learn? So go ahead and feel free to drop that into the chat. Or if you would like to, you can go ahead and unmic and talk with us. We're a fairly small group today and definitely feel free to unmic and ask questions at any point. Great, so not seeing a lot. Casey is saying he's starting from scratch. So that's a perfect, I think a lot of us are in that same position. Somebody is working to update an existing OER with accessibility in ED islands. That's fantastic. Love to hear that. And excited, and Tann's excited to learn more. So that's fantastic as well. Foundation, foundational knowledge, great. Video producer, Michael's here from UBC Studios looking on info of accessibility visually and text-wise. That's fantastical. As we all know in the last couple of years we've begun using video a lot more in our teaching and learning. So fantastic to be thinking about that. Casey, did you have a comment there? I was just going to say I believe Michael knows more about video and audio accessibility than I might. He is an expert. And if you ever need assistance at UBC, UBC Studios is fantastic. So do connect with Michael. He is great. Perfect. Perfect. Bringing his approach to his work with the awareness of UDL which is Universal Design for Learning and EDI is a fantastic way to approach that. So when we talk about accessibility OER is often positioned as a strategy that can address or remove a lot of the barriers for accessing learning materials. So at their heart OER just teaching and learning resources and they can include full courses, course materials, videos, textbooks, streaming videos, test banks, platforms, pretty much anything that's used in an educational context that are free of costs and access barriers and which also carry a legal permission for open reuse. Generally this permission is branded through the use of an open copyright license like a Creative Commons license which allows anybody to freely use, adapt and share the resource at any time. So using OER is often positioned as a great strategy for accessible course content because it can save time and money. So online versions of OER are free for students and instructors to use. There's no access codes needed. There's no expiration date on the materials. So students are able to retain that even if they go on to future courses they can still have access to the materials that they took in previous courses. There's no need to gain permission or pay to use or copy or distribute the OER and this makes it really easy to distribute and circulate amongst unlimited number of students. And then really importantly for accessibility it can be used, edited or adapted without fear of copyright infringement. So instructors can change the content to suit their needs, their teaching method, their curriculum, their student diversity or student backgrounds or the accessibility of it. And importantly OER is often available in a variety of formats. So for example, we often see open textbooks being in both a online version that's often a browser based version but also a downloadable version that can also be a PDF file. Sometimes it's a PDF file plus a Word document. Sometimes it's people even include the XML exports out of their tools like press books so other people can easily import those and adapt them as well. So OER at UBC has a large history of use. The last time we did a study on this in the 2021 academic year we found about 19,000 UBC undergraduate students were using OER in roughly 60 course or course sections and those were course or course sections that had specifically replaced paid resources with OER. So speaking of paid resources I do like to talk about how affordability is a barrier. Sorry, let me go back for learning materials and can be an accessibility issue. So the cost of learning materials can have a real impact on student wellness as well as instructors teaching and learning strategies. For example, according to the 2022 AMS academic experience survey, the AES which the AMS does every year and this year they had a roughly over a thousand undergraduate respond to that survey. They found 31% of undergraduate respondents indicated that they were somewhat or strongly concerned about not being able to come back to UBC at some point in the future due to financial reasons. Additionally, over 19% of both graduate and undergraduate student respondents reported having concerns about food insecurity the ability to feed oneself on a monthly basis. So this sort of financial precarity can lead to decisions that can impact learning. And just for more context, that same survey found that the average amount of undergraduate students the average amount UBC undergraduate students are spending annually is increasing. So this year it increased from $893 in 2021 to $1,253 in 2022. So we see that trend going up and that's probably not surprising is the cost of many things are going up these days. But importantly, what we also see and this has been consistent throughout all the years I've looked at this survey is roughly 60 to 70% of undergraduates reported that they did not buy textbooks because of the cost. And overall in 2022, nearly 30% of undergraduate respondents reported they often or frequently went without textbooks or other course materials specifically due to the cost. So for me, if over 25% of the students in a course I'm teaching are not able to use the materials that I think would help them be successful in their learning in the course that becomes a teaching and learning issue. And that's a barrier that that should be thought about. Sorry for the slides. So accessibility beyond just financial accessibility is really important for OER and the OER community. And I'd like to talk a little bit about why we should be thinking about accessibility and open education together. I often begin workshops with the question, what does open mean in the term open educational resources? And a really common response that I hear almost every time is that they're free. They're freely available resources, free online textbooks or free access, open access journal readings or free open source software or platforms that students or instructors do not have to pay to use. And now as we've seen affordability can be a huge barrier for the use of learning materials. But when we talk about OER is educational materials that anyone can freely use, adapt or share anytime. I think what's especially important is to think about who that anyone is and how learners will be able to utilize your resources. So at a very high level open education is grounded in the principles of education as a human right. And the open ed movement traces the traces that's respect to the universal declaration of human rights in 19th, which was adopted by the UN in 1948, which states everybody has a right to education. According to the seminal Cape Town 2007 OER declaration, which really increased the understanding or increased the definition of OER, they stated that the open education movement is quote, built on the belief that everyone should have the freedom to use, customize, improve and redistribute educational resources without constraint. However, if we're not taking into account the actual experience of learners and utilizing our specific resources, we may be inadvertently creating constraints and barriers still. For open, the free and available online point is a great starting point, but some simple and some early design choices can really elevate those materials to make them accessible for more, if not all learners. Sorry for the slides are a little slow. So what else kind of besides costs and sort of the format or the actual materials can affect accessibility? And I would say all sorts of things go into that. And they can be very much context dependent and can vary from student to student. I like this list, which was originally compiled by Josie Gray, who's the advisor of inclusive design at the OER collections at BC campus. And for example, she states that a student's day-to-day life can affect access and consider a student who has to commute on a very crowded bus for hours a day and may have limited time for actually using their resources outside of that bus trip. And they may even have more anxiety about being on the crowded bus this year or consider the students who have multiple roommates who all need to attend streaming sessions at the same time and their streaming may get laggy or their zoom may get tapped out and they're not able to actually access those streams. Another thing that may affect accessibility are the differences in digital literacy and technology access among students. And I think many of us who work on computers all day take for granted our comfort and our experience working with digital content, but that's not always true with students. And I think we have this digital native as sort of a, I don't know, a mythology amongst our students where students may have varying levels of being able to use different platforms and different tools. And a student can't learn well from a resource that they don't know how to use or that they don't like using. And something that can be an issue here at UBC is not all platforms work well on all devices and particularly mobile devices like tablets may not be suitable for certain types of platforms or some types of content. And then the final thing really to highlight is the structure of information and how you organize and structure your textbooks or your resources to make it easy to use and navigate is really important. And that means paying attention to things like the chapter numbers, the titles, the use of sections and subsections, numbering systems, headings. These considerations will vary from resource to resource but the more intentional you are in thinking about structure, organization and navigation, the more useful and powerful your resource will be which on its own will increase the accessibility of that resource. So the affordability, the day-to-day life, the digital literacy, the access to technology, all of these things are very individualized and context-dependent. But these are things where I think OER can really make a difference. Everyone has a preference and it has the ability in how they would like to access their learning materials and designing our OER materials with accessibility in mind can help make them truly open. So I really think there's this great synergy between OER and accessibility. So I'm very excited for this pilot that I'm working on with AC this year. I'm gonna turn it over to AC to take us more deeper into actual accessibility. Great, thank you so much, Will. I am assuming it might just be easiest for me to carry on with the slides as they're currently functioning. So I'm not gonna try and leap into a slideshow on my machine if that sounds okay with you. Let me know if they get to irritating. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much, Will, for that introduction. I am thrilled to be chatting with you all today. Just before we begin, I want to let everyone know I'm always available for consultations of any type. So if you have a specific question about content platform or a more general question about accessibility within your field discipline class everyday life, you can always email me, ac.deggar at ubc.ca. I love chatting with people. I love weird questions about file formats. I love annoying questions about why your image is doing a thing you don't want it to do. So please always feel free to reach out whether it's about a specific OER project, whether it's about questions about accessibility in general. I am here at your disposal. Today is going to be kind of an introductory overview sort of day. For a lot of folks, this might be review, but I just want to make sure we're all kind of on the same page when it comes to questions of accessibility, accessibility versus accommodation and what we mean when we talk about designing and implementing accessible content. So that'll be kind of what we cover today. Going forward in future workshops to come, we will kind of dig deeper into some of those specific questions about how do I make this type of content accessible? How do I ensure that this platform is working for my students? We'll be having some more kind of hands-on and question-based sessions to come. And again, you can always reach out on a one-to-one basis as well. So as a brief kind of introduction to where I come from and also to make sure folks are aware of the resources that are available, I'm from the UBC Center for Accessibility. Hopefully you are familiar with us and hopefully we're not just kind of that shadowy zone somewhere in Brock Hall that sends you threatening letters about getting your exams to us in a ridiculous seven-day timeframe when you're often pressed for time. We know that's rough. Hopefully our discussion day will help explain why sometimes we have to get that kind of long-term advance from you. UBC Center for Accessibility is here to support registered UBC students with documented conditions, wide variety of conditions are supported. But one particular thing about our services is that they are tied specifically into accommodations which are legal in nature versus accessibility which is more kind of design oriented. So the students we're working with are students who have specifically registered with us because of a documented disability. We work with those students, with their instructors, their advisors, sometimes their families, other staff at UBC to make sure the student is supported and that all of those accessibility needs are met. Again, that is a legal requirement on the part of UBC. We are required by the province and by Canada to make sure that students are able to access the services and the education that they've come to UBC to enjoy. So we are in some ways limited in what we can do and in some ways we are kind of bound by fairly strict requirements when it comes to making sure those needs are met. Accommodations are determined on a case-by-case basis. Students bring documentation from their medical providers, sometimes from previous educational experiences. An accessibility advisor meets with that student determines what is needed as part of their accommodation package. Those accommodations can change over time. On the instructor end, that typically is information that's conveyed to you in the form of a letter that will come where the student might reach out to introduce themselves individually. Most typically the accommodations that we deal with involve extended time, private space or other considerations for exams. That might mean ensuring the student's able to access a washroom or get up and walk around. Note-taking assistance for students who might not physically be able to take notes easily or might need assistance when it comes to interpreting audio or visual content in the classroom, making sure they get that content into their notes. Alternate format materials, so making sure that students can access their textbooks, their class notes and their exams in a format that works for them if they're using assistive technologies or have other impairments that might mech that tough. Ability training, making sure that students can find their way around campus, can easily kind of trans to cross campus, get into classrooms. Captioning and sign language interpretation. Reserved seating, adaptive furniture, accessible classroom assignments, the list goes on. We have a lot of kind of specific accommodations that we'll work through again on that case-by-case basis for students. Accommodations are non-optional as you've probably come to be aware when you've been encountering requests from the Center for Accessibility. It's something that we are legally bound to ensure is met for the student. So when we come to you, it's because we've gone through this lengthy process with the student to ensure that we've kind of gotten them medically evaluated, that they have a kind of specific set of needs and that we have ways of meeting those needs. So the UBC Center for Accessibility is here for all of those registered students. We can help students get documentation, help them get registered, but if they don't have that kind of big old slash medical threshold met by a documented condition, they might have to go through a rather lengthy process of getting that documentation, which means that they might be limited in terms of what kind of access they can support. Given medical wait times in the province, it can be a lengthy process. Students may be waiting for up to a year to get evaluated in some cases. Sometimes students discover sort of retroactively they have to go back and get paperwork from somebody who might have retired. So we're often trying to find ways to support students where they might be sort of falling between the cracks when it comes to those legal accommodations. We also might have students who would really benefit from additional alternate formatting support but don't necessarily have that as part of their documentation. So that is where, sorry, I'm getting a slide lag. Okay, there we go, I think we were set. So accommodations often do incorporate this idea of accessibility. A lot of our students do get kind of alternate format documents. In many cases that might mean text that is selectable text that they can use with adaptive software, text that they can zoom in on or text that they can print out and read offline. Increasingly as we're all looking at screens a lot more these days, students might have as part of their accommodation less screen time or a variety of reasons. But those accommodations again, are kind of legally and medically specific. Accessibility is a sort of broader concept that might touch upon some of those accommodations when it comes to students who might have perceptual impairments or might not be able to physically hold a book, turn the page. But accessibility also benefits and supports students who don't necessarily have documented accommodation based conditions, students who might not have that documentation yet or students who might not necessarily identify as like needing accommodations. Many students find that they are supported by accessibility choices that do benefit students who have kind of specific content requirements. But a lot of folks find that they absorb content better if they're watching a video and have the captions on because they're able to read along and helps keep them engaged. A lot of folks find that design choices in layout and format that might benefit students with cognitive impairments or visual impairments also is really helpful for students who might not physically have those impairments but might be tired, might be cognitively burdened by the stresses of class, might be having some eye tiredness from looking at screens. We can all benefit from having a reduced cognitive load and from having content that's easy to use, pleasant to use, engaging without being overwhelming. So a lot of those design choices that benefit our students who do have accessibility needs really benefits students more broadly as well. Kind of returning to that idea of access and barriers. Getting the documentation needed for accommodations can be expensive. Students, especially who don't necessarily have a lot of financial support or family support, students who might be first generation college students don't necessarily know how to navigate that really complex system of doctors and therapists and the Center for Accessibility itself. It can be itself almost a part-time job for students getting that accommodation in place. So students who don't necessarily have that support from their K through 12 experience often need between three to eight months to really get fully documented, evaluated and in our system and registered. So especially for first and second year students who might be coming to college realizing that the university level is the next level and they can't get by with their coping mechanisms that we're working for them in K through 12, those students often have a rough time making that transition to university level work at UBC. So ensuring that your content is accessible broadly speaking, benefits not just those students who already have accommodations in place but also those students who might be in the process of discovering that they need accommodations but might be finding it's going to take them weeks or months to get those accommodations in place. And again, it can also really benefit students who don't necessarily have specific conditions that allow them to access that legal support but that would definitely make their lives easier if they had access to those accommodations. So designing for accessibility helps us get around those limits of access, time, cost, experience and it also broadly supports students. So providing content that's easier to access, content that can be accessed in a variety of formats will benefit not just students who have accessibility needs but students more broadly. If you're designing for a screen reader you're also designing for mobile. You're designing for different types of device access. You're probably making it easier for your students to print things and read offline if that helps them concentrate on the bus or if that helps them get around having shaky internet access at home or if it gets them around the distraction of having content open in a tab in a browser with lots of other enticing things on the internet that they could be looking at instead of your lecture notes. So making as many content choices open as possible will support your students across the board. So that's kind of getting us into this idea of why accessible design is not just specifically for students who might be registered with CFA it's not necessarily just for students who might be using adaptive technologies like screen readers or refreshable plural displays or large zoomable displays. It's going to help you accommodate as many learners as possible, ideally with minimal effort and expenditure of stress on your end. So our goal here is to help you make content that is accessible for the vast majority of your students is content that you don't have to kind of retroactively edit, reformat down the road and is content that will really help make sure that your students are able to engage without stress and without distraction. The great thing about accessibility design content is that it also accommodates you the instructor when you want to go back and revise when you want to change you're not going to necessarily be stuck with content that's in an outdated file format because you've chosen something that will be a little bit durable and future-proofed. It will be content that won't necessarily need you to scrounge around and find new images to replace the ones that you screenshotted because you've found that in reproducing and resaving your files, you've gotten JPEGs that are just jaggedy and chunky and full of visual artifacts. So it's for you, it's for your students and while it will support those students who do have documented disabilities it'll support your students more generally as well. When I say adaptive technologies I'm covering kind of a broad territory. I do have a few quick demos that I'd like to see if I can get up and running for you because I know folks may not necessarily be familiar with some of these technologies. So again, the vast majority of students who are registered with Center for Accessibility don't necessarily use these adaptive technologies. Some of them do, some of them don't. Our largest kind of population of students getting alternate format would be students who'd like to have selectable text which they would use in a text-to-speech format. So basically software like a screen reader that will read to the student. If you've used any of the online journals through UBC Library you might have already kind of played around with some of these content settings yourself increasingly commercial websites as well are offering that option to sort of click on that little button that looks like a speaker and have the text read to you which is great and makes our lives easier because it's increasing the types of content formatting available. In cases where that's not a default option not all journals offer that service. Some texts with manufacturers offer it, some don't. We can provide the students with file formats that their software can read to them. Increasingly the options available for folks using the built-in accessibility settings on their devices are really quite robust. We do have some students who use kind of a specialty screen reader if they have impaired vision I will demonstrate what that looks like. But if you ever want to play around with this technology yourself you can always go into your devices accessibility settings on the Microsoft platform the option is called narrator on the Mac iOS ecosystem it's called voiceover and you can kind of recreate that experience for yourself having your device read aloud to you. Let me just pull up my demo video. I was playing around with the idea of having the screen reader read content to you and I realized it's going to hijack my Zoom audio. So instead I am using a demonstration of the JAWS screen reader which is a proprietary platform but fairly broadly used by students kindly demonstrated by a gentleman at Penn State in this particular video. Let me go ahead and share my screen, here we go. And the demonstrator here will be walking you through the process of navigating with a web browser while using the screen reading software. So when you do have students using that adaptive technology this is what their experience is like when they're relying upon specifically screen reading software to narrate their devices behaviors to them. Hopefully gather from that demonstration. Users who are relying on screener technology are very dependent upon the architecture of your content tags and headings are pretty critical. Not all students who are using adaptive software will use that full on navigational version of a screen reader. Often students will be kind of more specifically using the screen reader within a word within a proprietary publisher provided textbook format within a PDF within only the readings that they have on canvas. And students will necessarily use that for all of their course content. But when we are designing for students we wanna make sure that we are meeting the needs of students who might be using adaptive software that really depends upon that kind of formatting and layout. The Center for Accessibility is able to kind of retroactively format for students who are using specific screen readers but that can be a very slow and time consuming process to kind of give you an idea of what that might look like for a student to another quick screen share. I'm not doing more audio so mercifully I don't think we'll have to watch me fiddle around too much more. But to kind of give you an example of what content might look like when formatted for a screen reader we will take content that is sort of an ordinary textbook layout. And we will go ahead and add in image descriptions we will break lists down into a table format we will make sure that headings are incorporated. So in this case what would ordinarily be a pyramid shaped graphic which is sort of divided into layers is described through text. So in cases where students are using a screen reader and not able to kind of engage with that visual content we'll sort of retroactively turn that content into something that is more accessible. Ideally we can work with instructors who are creating their own resources to make those resources accessible from the start. That doesn't mean you have to go through the process of putting something into full on e-text we do have teams of people to do that for you for students who have that as their accommodation but we can often help you format your content in such a way that we don't necessarily have to retroactively do that for the students themselves. Now let me go ahead and see if I can get back into my slides. We do, so well we don't necessarily follow up directly the question is whether students who place requests for alternate format get follow up through the instructor once we've completed that formatting. Typically when we're working with a student who might have sort of more intensive formatting needs we will go ahead and meet with the instructor along with the student and this will typically be a student-led process with the student advocating for their own needs and we'll sort of work with the instructor to determine what timelines for content production will be depending upon the student's requirements and also the content type. So for really image-based content that is going to require a lot of kind of back formatting image description that will sometimes be a slower process and it'll work with the student and the instructor where necessary to sort of adjust assessment timelines. In most cases we try and get that content formatted for the student ideally before the course starts. If not before the course starts then we do try to get it to the student in a timely fashion following the syllabus to make sure that we're getting the student the readings roughly around the time they were assigned. So we won't necessarily notify the instructor and keep them looped in but we will typically be working with the instructor to make sure they know what the timeline is like for the student. In many cases where that's a concern we will also work with the instructor to get copies of slide decks either in advance or shortly after class so we can format any images or content that might be sort of PowerPoint based for the students well. Again, we don't necessarily have many clients who have that level of formatting need. So in the rare cases where those occur we typically reach out to the instructor ahead of time and sort of work with them. I would say we have probably, I don't wanna give that specific numbers but I would say certainly fewer than 15 students who have that kind of level of really sort of extended formatting requirement. In many cases just ensuring that the content you're producing is using headings is using selectable text will cover a lot of students need. I'm gonna go ahead and jump back to my slideshow here because I'm mindful of the time. So while you don't necessarily need to design to those screen reader specifications in all cases working with your content to ensure that it is selectable adjustable and that it does meet those requirements can really be helpful for a wide variety of students. One concern that kind of is helpful when thinking through how to build accessible content is starting with the idea of where your content is going to live in what format you plan to disseminate it to your students. So for many folks that might be a mixture of platforms that might mean using Canvas that might mean using a collaboration platform like Glass or Piazza or Webworks that might mean using Jupyter Notebooks that might mean using Tapestry that might mean using Pressbooks. Folks will have different needs depending upon the content that they want their students to engage with but making sure that your platform is accessible and open will help to ensure that your content is accessible as well. So that might mean thinking through how students get into your platform. Are they going to need to log in? Do they have to create a separate password? Is this something that they can log in through CWL? Do they need a VPN? Is this something they can access via mobile? If they're commuting and they want to get some homework done on the bus, is that feasible with the platform that you've chosen? If they want to print things or work offline, is that possible with the platform that you've chosen? If you're going to be having multimedia content like video or audio or images that students need to consult, if you're going to be having links to outside resources, how do students navigate through those? Do they need to open up a bunch of different tabs in their browser? Is this something that can comfortably be accessed on a small screen? If folks might have visual issues that mean they need to zoom in, are they going to be scrolling a lot? Is it going to be something that they can really engage with easily? If you'd like yours is to be inputting content. How will they do that? Will they need to click on radio buttons? Will those be something that they can access easily with ScreenReader? Will they be able to easily navigate through the pages of your content? Will they be able to access any embedded quizzes or collaboration features like class or annotating images? And also your layout choices. So will you be putting content sort of on the page or will it be confined into text boxes? Will it be in chart and graph format? Are you going to be using embedded PDFs? Please don't do that. It's rough. Will you be having if it's HTML frames in your web pages or basically scroll boxes within scroll boxes where students might need to keep kind of zooming and scrolling to access your content? The simpler the layout you can choose, the better the user experience typically is going to be. As you could kind of pick up from that demo, having a lot of different headings can be helpful for navigation, but having a lot of different content objects to navigate can be quite taxing mentally. Even folks who are not using screen readers but might have issues of attention, memory concentration, having a lot of things on the page and having a lot of boxes to click through can feel engaging. You might be tempted to want to keep your students engaged by having lots of different little fiddly bits of content that can also be overwhelming and overall increase cognitive burdens. So anything that you can do for a layout choice that helps reduce that technological friction and frustration will lead to better user experiences and will also be easier for folks who might be accessing on mobile, accessing on less strong internet connections or who might want to work offline or print. That's not possible for all content types, but where possible, it's great to offer those options to folks. So that only is accessible content going to be great for students, both those who rely upon accessibility software and those who just might benefit from having clean easy to use layout with selectable text. It will also make your teaching life easier. It will be durable content, flexible content and functional content, meaning that when you return to a slide deck or a resource, a textbook that you used in a previous term and it's time to update that content, you're not going to find that you've been locked out of proprietary service that might have changed its description structure or gone into business. You're not going to be stuck with file formats that neither you nor your students can open. And it's going to be content that you're going to be able to edit and update more easily. So if the content is easy for your students to access, it's going to be easy for you to access and as the state of your discipline changes, as course requirements change, as you get student feedback that tells you, oh, I'd like to focus more on this content that's modular and easy to edit and easy to kind of reformat will be easy for you to update as well. It's also going to be more enticing for your students to engage with. I know there's various from class to class and discipline to discipline, but sometimes getting students to do the readings is half the battle. And the more engaging, cleaner and easier to use your content is the more likely they are to read it and then you don't have to spend time repeating yourself in class over and over again. So all of these things work together to ensure content accessibility. They also benefit you as an instructor. Often when we think about OER projects, we start thinking about things like textbooks, we start thinking about things like course modules, manuals, question banks. So then the question becomes, what formats are these textbooks and resources going to be available to the students in, right? I think a lot of us often kind of think about, especially text-based content in the context of specifically word documents and PDFs in a way that's sort of what academia has trained us to do. PDFs are technically now an open format. They do kind of meet that threshold requirement, I believe as of December, 2020. So I have to, I know, I'm sorry, well, technically they are an open format because they're technically not completely proprietary now, but I don't know that we wanna really call them an open format and technically they're accessible, but I don't wanna call them that either. There might be some very specific use cases where you might have specific types of content that works well in a PDF. They might feel kind of like the default option because they're familiar, but in most cases, there are better and more pleasant options for you and for your students. We can always consult with you if you're curious about those. Pressbooks is a great option because it allows students to turn the thing into a PDF if they want to or an EPUB or to print it out, but you're not stuck with it as a PDF. Wikis can be a great way of hosting content online. HTML, of course, web pages are often very accessible kind of by default. EPUB can be a great option as well. If you absolutely positively have something that you feel you deeply need as a PDF, you do want to make it an accessible PDF. There are settings and options and walkthroughs within Adobe Acrobat and Pro that help you kind of work through that process. It is a rather time consuming and painstaking process. You do need to use tags. It can be a bit difficult to do. It's not really what you see as what you get type of editor. It can be done, but where possible, working with these other more open platforms will be more a pleasant experience for you because you're not going to have the incredibly frustrating process of editing tags in PDF where one false move can corrupt your file completely. And you're also not going to have students who might not be able to access the accessible settings that you've so painstakingly coded in because they're not using a specific PDF reader. Whatever format you choose for your content, you want to make sure that your text is selectable, which means when you highlight it on the screen, you can actually kind of see that little highlight box. That means that the student's accessibility software can read it as well. If you can select the text, so can their software. Text should also be adjustable, meaning that users can change the font, the size, can ideally change both the text and background color. I know that's not always possible, but where it's possible, that's great. Where students can print out the content if they'd rather have it on paper, where they can zoom in, and again, where they can select that text. When you do have to use a PDF, never, never, never make it an image-based PDF. Please always make sure it is a PDF where you can select the text. Where possible, you'd want to limit the use of text boxes, tables, and charts. We will address this more specifically in workshops to come. Sometimes there's content, again, that you really want to put in a chart or table, but as you might have gathered from that screen reader demo, screen readers don't always know whether to go across or down when reading columns of text or might find that when they're trying to read text contained in a cell or a box, it's not visible to them. And so therefore the student doesn't get access to that content. So we want to make sure we're not putting things into boxes if we can avoid it. Simplified list formatting, bullet points, always great. And again, you'll want to use headings and tags when you're creating that text-based content. For image-based content, it helps the differentiate between decorative images versus load-bearing images. So if you have an image that is sort of like illustrative, some people love to throw stazzy little memes in to kind of brighten the student's day. Always whimsical, always fun, can be a nightmare for folks who are trying to describe those images in some instances. So when you're using image-based content that's not necessarily key to the concepts you're presenting, you can usually get away with a brief, maybe one sentence or less description of a photograph of a patient that you're using to demonstrate content about patient education within a medical course, say. If you're using a chart or a table where the image kind of is the content, if you're asking students to perform analysis of the image chart, the table graph, in those cases, you do want to have a full image description. We will talk about that more in the upcoming image-based workshop. When you're entering this image-based description, different platforms might have kind of different tags or different ways of entering that content. Again, we'll cover alt text versus image description in an upcoming meeting, but kind of briefly alt text tends to kind of be that hover-based content where you sort of put your mouse over an image and it will have kind of a brief description. Image descriptions tend to be more intense, more involved, more in-depth and covering things like graphs or tables that the student is being asked to interpret. You don't want to rely on color, size, positionality to convey meaning. We'll talk more about that in our data visualization workshop, but briefly, you want to make sure that you're not asking students to differentiate or understand content based solely on the color of something, red versus green, for example, because folks who are colorblind would not be able to identify that. It's important to have fun, but it's more important to ensure that your students can actually read the content. So again, you want to make sure that any infographics or images you're creating that have text and image combined are not necessarily using non-selectable text where a student who is using assistive software might not be able to access the text that's embedded in that image for you. We will get more in-depth into that in workshops to come. We'll also talk about creating accessible images. It's often tempting to use and reuse screenshots because we're often in a rush, but not only do those screenshots tend to degrade and get pixelated and jaggedy over time, but students who are needing to zoom in or print off those images in a larger format might get really blurry, pixelated, unusable results. Even students who don't necessarily have visual impairments or they need to zoom might find, once you've used the same screenshot a couple of times, it's going to start getting chunky and they're not going to be able to read the lines on your graph, for example. When you're creating your own images, vector graphics are amazing. They're accessible and they're durable. You can zoom in. You don't have those kind of pixelation artifacts as an issue. You can put them everywhere. You can create them through Adobe Creative Cloud. You, as faculty, have access to that. Your TAs might not have access to that and your students might not have access to that. And you might not always have access to that because sometimes it can be awkward to access through UBCIT. So we do have free and open-source options available to you if you're trying to create accessible images for your content. You can also, of course, use open images that you have licensing or permission to use for your content. You just want to make sure that they are accessible and that you are including image descriptions where those are load-bearing images, shall we say. For video and audio accessibility, we'll again kind of touch on this in workshops to come. Captions are great. They're not just for folks who might have hearing impairments. Many people benefit from and enjoy using them, increasingly we have found, possibly because students have just been engaging with a lot of streaming content that they've gotten from a variety of sources for captions are default-based, that it's sort of an expectation these days that captions are available. Even folks who don't necessarily have it as an accessibility need, often have it as an accessibility want and it really helps with the retention and incorporation of the learning concepts. Folks who don't necessarily have your teaching language as their first language will also really benefit from captions. Full audio descriptions, not always needed, but you do want to avoid what we might call a point-and-wave technique where you're working on a whiteboard, say, and pointing at a formula or pointing at a graph and saying, as you can see, this, this, this. Make sure that you are fully narrating things that you are showing so that students who are listening to the audio that you're presenting them are able to engage with the content as well. Where possible, also provide transcripts for audio content. Make sure that you're identifying different speakers if there's more than one speaker. Make sure you're including non-verbal content where possible. Again, we can work with you. Michael at UBC Studios is an amazing resource for that as well. One quick word on ASL. Often folks will think of sign language as sort of a default accessibility feature. It's not something that we have a lot of student demand for in terms of support. It's great to provide where possible, but it's often quite expensive and because there's such high demand, we often have a difficult time accepting requests for ASL interpretation if we don't have at least three weeks to a month of lead time. Through Center for Accessibility, we can help you connect with vendors for events if you have the need to include ASL. Students who do have that as an accommodation are already working with us, so we're already working to help ensure that they have that support, but if you're creating resources for folks, you do want to focus on captions and transcripts before going to ASL because captions and transcripts will cover a lot more ground for a lot more folks and it's kind of a more default accessible feature than ASL. We find a lot more demand for it too. I am sorry that I talked a little too long, but just very quickly, we will be getting more into Tables, Figures, Interactive Content and Images in our upcoming lecture on April the 6th, 12 to 1 p.m. I will have my screen sharing sorted out by then. I thought I did today, but we will be covering questions that you might have about visual-based content. April 25th, 11, 12 p.m., we will be talking more about tools and platforms, so kind of those interactive, collaborative platforms where you might want students to interact with each other, question banks, Jupyter Notebooks, other forms of kind of engagement platform, not specifically image or text-based will be covered in that workshop to come. Again, I would love any questions you might have. Please feel free to reach up the email. I was going to offer a question time and then I talked to you all, so I apologize for that, everyone. Yes, let me put my email in the chat for anyone who might want to hear.