From the Faculty of Arts, Jonathan L. Graves, Associate Professor of Teaching in the Vancouver School of Economics (VSE), discusses how his team made ECON 326’s technical notation more accessible by making it readable to screen readers.
What motivated you to engage with the UDL Fellows program?
I serve as VSE’s Director of Undergraduate Studies for Curriculum and Students, and UDL was an area of interest for me, since as a director it’s important for me to be familiar accessible practices so that I can help other faculty incorporate them into their teaching. On a personal level, I was interested in enhancing my classes, because I teach several courses on applied statistics in economics (econometrics), and those courses include material that makes them difficult for students. In particular, the use of technical language and notation is something I have been concerned with for some time as inaccessible, particularly for students who use screen readers.
Could you please tell me more about and walk me through your project making ECON 326 more accessible and what changes you made by applying UDL principles?
I worked with a team from Arts ISIT, including Henry Hu and Christopher Jung, to make some modifications to ECON 326, which is considered one of the harder courses in the economics program. It’s a fairly technical course in applied econometrics, so it requires a lot of math and a fair amount of coding experience. The main thing we accomplished was making the course materials more accessible: we took all the course notes, slides, lab manuals, etc., and modified them to make them readable to students using screen readers or other forms of assistive technology.
Can you share any resources, tools, or practices you found helpful in making implementing UDL easier?
We first did a review of different tools and frameworks for text readability, as one thing that’s vital when you’re working with text that’s not standard English is the software and the production pipeline you use to produce teaching materials. This is because the software’s recognition of what you type and how it’s rendered for students using screen readers varies by tool. What we learned pretty quickly is that a lot of fairly standard pieces of software, like Adobe PDFs and documents that were produced to work with Adobe Acrobat, are highly inconsistent in how they render text, which means that you get really unpredictable results from the output of these tools. So what we ended up settling on was using a program called Quarto, which works really well because it’s primarily based on HTML, which is great for rendering mathematical notation and is also free and open-source.
Another thing I want to mention is just getting used to screen readers. If you’re not someone who uses assistive technology, you’ve probably never tried one before. However, by spending some time using screen readers yourself, you can learn how they operate and identify where many of the barriers exist for users of these technologies.
Did you experience any challenges with implementing UDL, and how did you overcome them?
Unfortunately, accessibility is the often the last thing that is considered when designing the tools and systems we use most today. For example, take the PDF standard. It’s used everywhere but currently has no standardized and consistent way of displaying mathematical notation; it has several inconsistent and competing standards that vary wildly across different kinds of software. We had to be cautious to specify and pin down every part of the environment we were using. How we are rendering files, what versions we were using, what formats we were producing—all of that had to be really carefully managed. It took a lot of time because you’d create something that looked appealing visually and seemed to work fine; however, when tested in a different browser or with another option selected, it often failed to function as before. Overcoming these challenges just meant we had to spend a lot of time working on making sure we were communicating to students in a way that was replicable, that they could duplicate themselves without too much work.
How have students benefited from the UDL strategies you have implemented?
We had one set of the course materials that was like a printable version, intended for people who didn’t need assistive technology, and then we had another version of the materials that were the accessible versions, and what we saw is a pretty good uptake of both of them. While we don’t know how much of it was people just clicking on both of the options, one thing we do know, which I didn’t anticipate, is that we actually had a number of visually impaired students in the course who said that they found the accessible materials very helpful.