Producing and Designing Accessible HTML Course Materials

Speakers

Current confired speakers include:

• Dr. David Hodge,  University of Glasgow

• Laura Midgley, Newcastle University

• Steve Clower, Desmos

• Dr. Sam Fearn, University of Durham

• Dr. Vincenzo Mantova, University of Leeds

Recordings and links

All talks (long and short!) are now available to watch. 

Here are also some useful links and tips from the chat across the day. Thank you everyone who contributed!

[On accessibility checkers] Firefox has a good 'inspect' mode that looks specifically for accessibility pitfalls - might be handy for reviewing HTML outputs. 

[On using tikz with BookML] I had to tweak some of my tikz code to work properly. The solution I went with in the end was to convert all tikz pictures to svg and manually alt-text them which I found to work better than having LaTeXML parse the tikz on its own. I did have some major problems with something called Wick contraction that's common in my teaching which are not supported by MathJAX or MathML so I again fell back on tikz & manual alt texts for this 

[On validation] My workflow involves using tools like the Wave browser plug-in to pick up primary accessibility issues. 

[On offline downloadable copies of Quarto site] If you upload HTML only then students who want an offline copy are advised to open it and print to / save as PDF in the browser (for HTML notes) and there's a special Export to PDF built into the slides (you can see it in my slides in the bottom left menu then Tools) 

We've had some students complaining about pagination and fidelity when printing from HTML to PDF in this way. Some want both the HTML and the PDF as created from LaTeX but for different ways. 

There is an option in Quarto called "embed-resources" which does all the embedding for you and it will make a single HTML file (it embeds pictures, videos by default remain hyperlinks) however the file gets large (easily 10+MB). 

[On page breaks in PDF output/printing from Quarto] If you're really fussy with pagination (like me) you can use conditional content divs to fix some stuff - I had a problem where really long callout boxes simply broke in pdf output 

There's a way to fix this. Adding some fancy things to the latex preamble. 

[On slides] Funny thing: LaTeXML was able to make moderately accessible beamer slides (but after lots of patching) (emphasis on moderately). Shame that the LaTeX project decided not to try, although I guess maybe they'll come back to it in the future. 

Location

The workshop will be located in Room 3.35 of the Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh. 

This can be found at 1 Lauriston Place, Edinburgh, EH3  9EF.