Student
Accommodations

Accommodation Guide for the Online Environment

Student Wellness and Accessibility Centre - Information for Faculty

Accessibility Tip Sheet

Word Accessibility Tip Sheet

PowerPoint Accessibility Tip Sheet

Accessibility Tools and Resource List

Options for Closed Captioning a “Live” environment, while delivering remotely

Blackboard Collaborate Ultra

Blackboard Collaborate Ultra is packed with the most accessibility features, in comparison with other popular webinar tools. Live Closed Captioning can be enabled by faculty to provide their learners with live Closed Captions. Live Captioning is not automatic and must be typed in by a designated individual, known as a “captioner”. The Captioner can be a colleague, student, or a 3rd-party individual coordinated by Accessible Learning Services.

• Consider recording all live sessions to provide your learners with a means to review your webinar at a later date. Content that is captioned live will be stored with Captions. Content that is not captioned live can be Captioned using Panopto (see below).

Resource: Live Captioning in Blackboard

Closed Captioning a completed webinar

Blackboard Collaborate Ultra

If you have recorded your webinar using Blackboard Collaborate Ultra, Closed Captioning can be added after the fact, by leveraging Panopto. First, download your Collaborate recording. Second, upload your recording into Panopto. Third, import the automatic captions (be sure to publish your changes).

Applying Closed Captioning to any video

Applying Closed Captioning to your own video

Closed Captioning can be applied to any video that you’ve created. If the video is yours, or if you have permission to copy it, you may upload it onto Panopto and leverage Panopto’s Automatic Speech Recognition.

Applying Closed Captioning to a video on YouTube

If you need to apply Closed Captioning to a video on YouTube, you can use Amara to create captions and “overlay” them onto a YouTube video. Once you create an account, you will have the ability to add your own, or browse captions that were created by the Amara community.

Applying Closed Captioning to any video in Panopto

Panopto uses Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to support faculty in Closed Captioning. ASR can be applied to any video in Panopto to save faculty time in applying captioning to their videos. ASR is approximately 80% accurate, and is more accurate if the speaker is clear and concise. Once ASR has been applied to a video, faculty can edit the automatic captions to improve accuracy. For information on activating ASR, see Panopto’s Guide to Adding ASR Captions into a Video.

Resource: How to create accessible videos in Panopto

1. When considering different web-conferencing tools, be aware that Blackboard Collaborate provides the most accessibility features

2. Please consider recording all live sessions – material for learners to re-reference is going to be critical right now

3. There is a link to the Blackboard sessions that can be sent ahead of time (see directions above and elsewhere). Using this function will support interpreters, computerized note takers or any other third party that is required to assist a learner

4. The US/Canada will be provided with free home licences for specific assistive technologies (i.e. JAWS, Kurzweil., ZoomText) until June 30, 2020 https://portal.freedomscientific.com/SponsoredSoftware

How UDL Can Support Your Transition to Online Teaching