Project leader: Dr Jonathan Graham-Harper-Cater, Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering

Accessibility is a key element in the design of all taught content and digital notes. With the innovative approach outlined by Bath Blend, our reliance on digital notes is ever increasing, further emphasising the importance of meeting accessibility standards. Existing methods often result in elements within PDF documents, such as equations, that are inaccessible to Screen-reader technologies. Removing these key elements would negatively impact a student’s education and it is therefore imperative that an accessible alternative is identified.

This project, which was awarded funding by the Teaching Development Fund (TDF), explores the development of an open-source tool to help automate generation of fully accessible notes with built in support for complex elements such as equations or code snippets. These notes are natively compatible with all digital devices making the experience better for all students. Taking mark-down input, it compiles fully accessible static web pages that are designed to integrate within a Moodle workflow. A prototype of this tool already exists, and has seen successful use within the Electronic & Electrical Engineering Department.

The project has successfully produced a tool that converts markdown into accessible and interactive notes and lab scripts. This has been used on a number of units within the electronic and electrical engineering department during the last semester looking to collect feedback and review what improvements or changes may be required. The tool is available as an open source repository on the Bath GitHub

Jonathan presented a talk during EduFest 2022, which detailed one of the use cases for the tool and reflected on the results, the presentation is available to view

A demonstration of the resulting notes page may be found hosted on moodle