Synchronous online sessions offer unique challenges and opportunities for accessibility. With some planning and preparation, you can help students with a diverse set of needs to thrive in your Teams class setting. By incorporating best practices to help students who have a variety of accessibility needs, we can also create an environment that is more effective for EAL students and students who are dealing with stress or trauma.
Create Content for People Who Use Screen Readers
Students who are blind or visually impaired often rely on a screen reader to help them navigate through and engage with online and digital resources. To present content in ways that are meaningful and useful for their users, screen readers have been designed to read not only the text on a page but the underlying HTML program language. For example, screen readers can identify text that is a link, differentiate between the heading and paragraph styles in a document or webpage, identify lists, and follow a given content reading order in a slide or PDF.
When you are creating learning materials, you can build in the information these devices require by using the styles, templates and accessibility checking options built into your software. These include bulleted and numbered lists, headings of various levels, and the ability to add a hyperlink to text. Online content created using a “WYSIWYG” or HTML editor (like the text editor you see in VIULearn) gives you these same options for headings, lists and links. VIULearn also will prompt for Alt text when you add an image and you can use the accessibility checker to review your pages before you post them.
When you create slides you have these same options for accessible headings, lists and links as well as templates which help screen readers know what order to present the content from each slide. PowerPoint also makes it easy to add Alt Text to images and figures so their meaning can be understood by anyone relying on a screen reader. The PowerPoint accessibility checker will prompt you to designate a title for each slide to help users find content quickly as well as prompting you to check reading order on slides with several elements.
Most accessibility checking tools (including those in VIULearn and Microsoft Office) will alert you if you have low colour contrast between text and background, if you have images without alt text, and if it looks like you may be missing headings or have a list that wasn’t created using the built in list function. These checking tools will offer suggestions to easily address identified issues.
Additional Resources
- Microsoft Accessibility Checker
- Create Accessible Word Documents
- Create Accessible PowerPoint
- Make Google Docs and Slides more accessible
- VIULearn Accessibility Checker
Share Accessible Content in Teams
Video conferencing can be limiting for people who rely on screen readers because much of what happens on shared screens is not accessible to them and it can be very difficult to read meeting chat that is happening at the same time someone is speaking. You can help these people access your content by:
- conveying important information verbally as well as visually
- giving everyone time to read and contribute to chat as its own activity rather than overlapping that with content sharing
- providing documents you want students to read during class prior the class session
- using available accessible tools.
These practices will also help students with dyslexia, students who struggle with multitasking or with focusing when there are multiple things happening simultaneously, and EAL learners.
If you don’t want to share your slides directly with students, we suggest using PowerPoint Live when possible to make your slides more accessible during meetings.
PowerPoint Live
PowerPoint Live is one of the options you will see when you select Share in your Teams meeting. This feature lets you share any PowerPoint you have saved to SharePoint or OneDrive and gives you and your student a more dynamic PowerPoint experience.
As the person sharing slides, you will see your slides in presenter view complete with some easy to use annotation tools to help you draw attention to specific elements of your slide as needed.
Each of your attendees will be able to control how the slides appear for them. Students can go back to a previous slide or jump ahead with a one click option to sync back up with you at any time. They can also increase Zoom in or out, choose a high contrast display, and even translate slide text to one of the supported languages. Links on slides shared using PowerPoint Live can be clicked on and opened by students. And, unlike a screen share, screen readers can detect and read the slide text.
Additional Resources
- Accessibility tools in Teams
- Present Inclusively with PowerPoint
- Using PowerPoint Live with Screen Readers
Closed Captions and Transcripts
Just as screen readers make visual content accessible for blind and visually impaired people, captions and transcripts can make audio content accessible to people who are deaf, hard of hearing and aid learning for EAL learners.
Captions include time stamp information that allows the text to appear in time with a video or audio record. When you are attending or hosting a live meeting that has auto-captioning, these captions are being automatically generated as people speak so they display in real time. If the session is recorded, these captions will display in sync with the video feed.
Most captions we interact with in video conferencing and while watching movies or TV are closed captions. These captions have to be enabled by the person watching the media. Because they are not part of the video stream, but instead are laid overtop of it, closed captions can be offered in multiple languages and on some platforms you can even configure the text size, colour and background.
A transcript is a written copy of spoken content which does not make use of timestamps. Transcripts are generally broken down by speaker and are designed to be human readable and often used as a stand alone resource rather than an accompaniment to a media stream. Transcripts can be very useful for helping you write minutes or write a summary of a meeting after it has concluded or for presenting an easy to read format for meeting content.
For maximum accessibility, we recommend providing both captions and a transcript. Any videos you put on VIUTube will have both captions and a transcript automatically generated and you can edit the captions within the VIUTube platform to correct auto-transcription mistakes.
In Teams, any participant can turn on captions for themselves, but you must be an organizer, co-organizer or presenter with a VIU Teams license in order to generate a transcript. Once generated, the transcript can be downloaded and you can correct any transcription mistakes in the downloaded copy before sharing it.
Please Note: By default, Teams identifies all speakers by name in live captions and the meeting transcript. If you or your students would prefer not to be identified by name in a meeting transcript you can opt out of this feature:
- Open the Teams application on your computer
- In the upper right of Teams click on the three dots to open a menu and then select Settings
- Go to Captions and transcripts
- Toggle the option “Automatically identify me in meeting captions and transcripts” off
Select the Right Recording Conditions
Not all students who are hard of hearing will rely on captions. Many people use lip reading to help them understand what they are hearing. To help these learners, make sure your face is well lit and visible in your video and try to position your camera so you are facing it as directly as possible. To minimize visual distractions, you can blur your background and even spotlight your video so it is always visible.
Additional Resources
Next steps
This post covered solutions for some of the most common accessibility concerns in online synchronous meetings. In the next part of this two part series we will dive into some of the less technical but no less important practices you can add to your meetings to further improve accessibility.
If you have questions or would like to talk about ways to build accessibility into your courses from day one, we would be very happy to meet with you. CIEL offers one on one consultations on pedagogical topics and around our learning technologies. To request a consultation you can fill out this web form or send an email to learnsupport@viu.ca. When emailing, we suggest including at least two days and times that will work for your schedule.
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