The most compelling life stories are often ones that allow us to connect with the storyteller and for many, the pursuit of academic opportunities form the basis of their narrative With this in mind, how do educational institutions enable Deaf/Deafblind to pursue their story- underpinned by equality of access in their educational journey? In our […]
Category: Student support
Caroline Mathiasen is a hearing impaired graduate student in the UK, in this blog she talks to Margaret McKay about her experience using assistive technologies to support her during her education. About me I lost part of my hearing when I was a young baby. Around sixty per cent of my hearing, to be more […]
It seems tautological to write a blog post on open access and accessibility. Surely if something is open access then it is open to anyone and therefore accessible to anyone? Alistair McNaught argues that the link between open access and accessibility is more nuanced than you might expect. Authors and institutions need simple guidelines to […]
A hectic new term. You come up to breathe. Alistair McNaught explores a new support service from Jisc and how it might help you better meet the needs of your disabled students. The new term begins. You have a new cohort of disabled students to work with. In many organisations, the support staff will be […]
As the start of the academic year is just around the corner we’ve pulled together some quick reminders and quick wins for you to consider when creating accessible resources, information and/or learning material. How do you make sure your Word documents are accessible? I use inbuilt heading styles (Heading 1, Heading 2 etc.) to structure […]
Text to speech is great but not everyone gets on with it. What other ways can we deliver words to eyes more efficiently? What about people who want to read with their eyes but have visual or other difficulties that make scanning normal pages tiring or inefficient? What about those who need bigger fonts but […]
Funding changes in Scottish FE sector prompt Margaret McKay to reflect on the wider opportunities for colleges to embrace digital inclusion in widenening participation… A review of funding to support disabled students in FE colleges in Scotland was undertaken last academic year (2015-2016). Engaging with a wide range of stakeholder groups, the Scottish Funding Council […]
We’ve talked before about the inclusivity benefits that are hidden in the tools and technologies that we use every day and are often overlooked. This blog by Margaret McKay and Rohan Slaughter describe ways of (i) taking advantage of the Ease of Access features in Windows (ii) how Roaming Profiles set up by the IT […]
A recent question on the Assistive-technology Jisc mail list (https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=ASSISTIVE-TECHNOLOGY) sparked some interesting debate. Alistair McNaught thought the debate was worthwhile enough to summarise as a blog post. In the process he discovered some weird and wonderful things about redeeming inaccessible PDFs… How are PDFs good for accessibility? If a PDF document has been created […]
We’ve already blogged on supporting reading and using built in browser tools but a question we often get is “What’s the difference between screen reading and text readers (or ‘text to speech’ technology)? Often the terms are used interchangeably but, in reality, they are two different kinds of technologies used in different ways. Margaret McKay helps […]