Providing accessible learning materials helps everyone to learn. Using some basic tools and making some small changes to your documents can make a big difference to students with disabilities.
Today (15th May) is Global Accessibility Awareness Day, so it’s a good day to see what you can do to improve the accessibility of materials in Blackboard.
You can access tools in both Blackboard and Microsoft Office to help you create accessible documents:
If you have 5 minutes today, look at the Ally Course Accessibility Report in one of your Blackboard courses. The section on content with the easiest issues to fix is a good place to start. This will guide you through some quick changes you can make straightaway.
Or you may find some things that you want to improve over the summer, as part of the annual course creation process. One of the biggest issues we see in Blackboard courses is non-OCR scanned documents. A good way to make sure that scanned documents are accessible is to speak to our Digitisation Team who can advise on scanning book chapters and journal articles.
Here at AU nearly 30% of our student population has a declared disability, so any improvements you make to the accessibility of your content will make a big impact on how students engage with them.
As leader of our PGCTHE programme, I keep an eye out for resources to help staff teach effectively. These include webinars, podcasts, online toolkits, publications and more. Topics include active learning, online/blended teaching, accessibility/inclusion, and effective learning design based on cognitive science. Below I’ve listed items that came to my attention in the past week. In the interest of clarity, our policy is to show the titles and descriptions in the language of delivery.
21/5/2025 Bioscience Education, Scholarship and Education (BEST) Network, Webinar featuring Josh Freeman from the Higher Education Policy Institute: “The HEPI/Kortext Student Generative AI Survey shows, for the first time, that almost all today’s students are using AI tools to help with their work”
Monthly series European Network for Academic Integrity, ENAI monthly webinarsfree open webinars on various topics related to academic integrity.
Please see the Staff Training booking page for training offered by the LTEU and other Aberystwyth University staff. I hope you find this weekly resource roundup useful. If you have questions or suggestions, please contact our team at lteu@aber.ac.uk. Social media: BSky, X.com.
We know that some staff use handwritten documents in lectures – these may be for working through calculations, or to demonstrate a process, or to draw a graph. When you upload these to Blackboard, they tend to have a low Ally score as they aren’t accessible for some users. Here are some ways that you can make these types of documents more accessible.
When you are writing in lectures make sure to use clear and consistent handwriting – try not to use cursive (joined up) text, and make sure you write at a good size. Using a felt tip pen such as a Sharpie will also help with contrast. If you can provide a typed version, add this to Blackboard along with the handwritten version. If this isn’t possible you may want to signpost students to another source for the equivalent material (for example a textbook, Panopto recording with captions, YouTube video etc).
When you do scan materials, you can use the university printers, as they all have an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) setting. This means that the text and images on your scan can be selected by a student. This helps with screen readers, as well as Blackboard Ally – Ally won’t create an MP3 file from a non-OCR document (although it will try and create an OCR version, but this doesn’t always work well). Make sure that you scan the correct orientation. Once you have done a scan, have a go at copying and pasting your text into Word so you can see what students might see or hear.
The PDF24 tool (available in the AU Company Portal) can also convert a non-OCR document into an OCR version. How successful this is will very much depend on the contents of your original document.
Students can make use of Google Lens to read documents in Blackboard and lens does seem to do a good job at reading out handwritten text. Have a look at guidance from Guide Dogs for more information. There are also more ideas for students on the Perkins website. If you do, make use of Google Lens:
Don’t use it to look at things that contain personal information about individuals
Have a look at the Google Privacy policy for more information about how your data is used
As leader of our PGCTHE programme, I keep an eye out for resources to help staff teach effectively. These include webinars, podcasts, online toolkits, publications and more. Topics include active learning, online/blended teaching, accessibility/inclusion, and effective learning design based on cognitive science. Below I’ve listed items that came to my attention in the past week. In the interest of clarity, our policy is to show the titles and descriptions in the language of delivery.
Data Rescue Project (2025), ERICA to the Rescue! “ERICA is a rescue catalog which preserves over 500,000 Open Access publications originally hosted by the US Department of Education in the ERIC research repository.”
Dickinson, J. (8/5/2025), Academic judgement? Now that’s magic: Jim Dickinson questions whether academic judgment can hold in the AI era, as flawed detection tools create a system where students can’t challenge misconduct allegations, WonkHE
Monthly series European Network for Academic Integrity, ENAI monthly webinarsfree open webinars on various topics related to academic integrity.
Please see the Staff Training booking page for training offered by the LTEU and other Aberystwyth University staff. I hope you find this weekly resource roundup useful. If you have questions or suggestions, please contact our team at lteu@aber.ac.uk. Social media: X.com, BSky.
This year’s conference boasts a number of external speakers.
Keynote speaker:
Dr Neil Currant will be offering a keynote presentation on Compassionate Assessment. There will also be a masterclass workshop with colleagues being able to apply these principles to their own scenarios. See our blog update for further information.
External speakers:
We’ve got three other external speakers lined up. For further information, click the links below:
Now, we’ve also got Professor John Traxler joining us for a special panel discussion on Generative AI.
This session will be taking place on the afternoon of Tuesday 8 July via Teams.
John Traxler, FRSA, MBCS, AFIMA, MIET, is Professor of Digital Learning, UNESCO Chair in Innovative Informal Digital Learning in Disadvantaged and Development Contexts and Commonwealth of Learning Chair for innovations in higher education. He is Academic Director of the Avallain Lab, leading research on ethical and pedagogic aspects of educational AI. His papers are cited around 12,000 times and Stanford continues to list him in the top 2% in his discipline. He has written over 40 papers and seven books, and has consulted for international agencies including UNESCO, ITU, ILO, USAID, DFID, EU, UNRWA, British Council and UNICEF.
He was a pioneer of mobile learning, starting in the 2000s with technology and pedagogy but, in the 2010s, concerned with the impact and consequences on societies, cultures and communities of mobility and connectivity, and on the nature of disadvantage. He is interested in the impact of AI on global and individual disadvantage and the decolonisation of the digital technologies of learning and education.
Our full programme will be announced in due course.
As leader of our PGCTHE programme, I keep an eye out for resources to help staff teach effectively. These include webinars, podcasts, online toolkits, publications and more. Topics include active learning, online/blended teaching, accessibility/inclusion, and effective learning design based on cognitive science. Below I’ve listed items that came to my attention in the past week. In the interest of clarity, our policy is to show the titles and descriptions in the language of delivery.
Monthly series European Network for Academic Integrity, ENAI monthly webinarsfree open webinars on various topics related to academic integrity.
Please see the Staff Training booking page for training offered by the LTEU and other Aberystwyth University staff. I hope you find this weekly resource roundup useful. If you have questions or suggestions, please contact our team at lteu@aber.ac.uk. Social media: X.com, BSky.
We’re delighted to be joined by colleagues from Higher Education Partners (HEP) on the final day of our conference (10 July).
Kate Lindsay from HEP will be presenting and leading a roundtable as part of the conference. Kate is currently SVP of Academic Services at HigherEd Partners, working with UK Universities to grow their capacity and capability in the the design of high quality online learning experiences.
Previously, Kate worked at the University College of Estate Management as Head of Digital Education, leading the transformation of fully-online programmes. Before that Kate was the Head of Technology Enhanced Learning / Director of Academic Services at the University of Oxford. Kate has experience working on teaching, learning and assessment strategy, digital education strategy, learning design consultancy, staff digital fluencies, curriculum design, and IT innovation programmes.
The University has partnered with HEP on the new online learning project as part of the invest to grow strand.
We’ll also be joined by colleagues in academic departments who are working with HEP for the first cohort of courses.
In the May update, we are particularly excited about auto-generate AI Conversations with the AI Design Assistant, Qualitative Rubrics, and Enhancements to Gradebook and Tests.
New: Auto-generate AI Conversations with the AI Design Assistant
The AI Design Assistant can now auto-generate AI Conversations. AI Conversations are conversations between students and an AI persona.
Socratic Questioning: Conversations that encourage students to think critically through continuous questioning.
Role-play: Conversations that allow students to play out scenarios with the AI persona, enhancing their learning experience.
Creating personas and topics for an AI Conversation can take a lot of time. To streamline this process, the AI Design Assistant can generate three suggestions at once. You can select what the AI Design Assistant generates. You can choose to generate:
AI Conversation title
AI persona
Reflection question
These suggestions provide inspiration for an AI Conversation. Instructors can refine the AI Design Assistant’s suggestions in several ways:
Provide additional context
Adjust the complexity of the question
Select context from the course
Manually revise the question
Image 1. The auto-generate feature is now available in AI Conversations.
Image 2. There are several ways to customise AI Conversations.
We recommend that you look closely at the AI persona to check for any biases that might be there and edit these.
We would love to hear about your use cases of AI Conversations – do let us know via elearning@aber.ac.uk.
New: Qualitative Rubrics
Lecturers can now create and use no-points rubrics for Blackboard Assignments. This rubric type allows instructors to assess student work based on criteria and feedback, rather than numerical values.
Instructors can select No Points as a rubric type when creating or generating a rubric. This option is available alongside existing percentage and points-based rubrics. Instructors can also edit rubrics to switch between different rubric types, including percentage, points range, and no points.
Image 1: No Points option is available in the Rubric Type dropdown.
The Markable Items tab in the Gradebook now features a redesigned interface to improve accessibility and navigation for keyboard-only and screen reader users. This enhancement supports an accessible experience for instructors grading student work, reducing the time and effort required to manage student grades.
With this update, the Gradable Items tab uses a table-based layout to enhance usability:
Screen reader users can now hear both header and row announcements, allowing for smoother navigation through student submissions.
Keyboard users can now move efficiently across rows or down columns using arrow keys.
Image 1: Gradebook with Markable items tab highlighted
Instructors can now create custom text-based columns in the Gradebook, giving them the ability to record information for an assessment, such as performance code, group membership, and tutoring information.
These columns allow instructors to record up to 32 characters. The column is not restricted to text input.
Colleague might want to use this to record dissertation supervision teams or markers.
Instructors can:
Create text-based columns via the Add workflow in both the grid view and Gradable Items page;
Name the column, control student visibility, and add a description;
Add and edit text information for a specific student using an inline eidt workflow.
Text-based columns exclude the following:
Points values (automatically set to 0 points)
Due dates
Categories
Gradebook calculations and related calculation UIs
Content in text-based columns auto-posts and supports sorting functionality within the Gradebook grid view. Instructors can also download and upload text-based columns using the Gradebook’s upload/download function.
Image 1: Instructors can select Add Text Item to create a text-based column.
Image 2: Instructors can enter column name, set visibility for students, and enter a description for the text-based column.
Students can access text-based columns and associated information in their Gradebook when the column is set to Visible to students.
New test setting: View submission one time
There is a new test result setting option, View submission one time.
When a student completes the test, they can review their answers and detailed feedback, such as which questions were answered correctly.
Image 1: Allow students to view their submission one time highlighted:
Instructors
To access this setting option, select Available after submission in the Assessment results section of the Assessment Settings, then select View submission one time from the Customise when the submission content is visible to students dropdown. This dropdown is available only if Allow students to view their submission is selected.
Note that this setting does not alter the recommended settings for online exams.
Ideas Exchange:
This section aims to keep you updated on progress of enhancements requested on the Blackboard Ideas Exchange.
We are pleased to see the Qualitative Rubric included in this month’s release as this is a feature that was requested as part of the SafeAssign pilot.
If you have any enhancements to request from Blackboard, please get in touch with us via elearning@aber.ac.uk.
