Supporting Students with SEN

We encourage instructors to consider accessibility when creating their course materials, including presentation slides, handouts, etc. Accessible contents can be used by a variety of users including students with SEN who are using assistive technologies. Here are some tips on making course materials accessible:

Tagging non-text contents with "alternative text" in documents and website contents
Using good semantic structure (such as heading in Word) for content structure in word documents
Using media that have closed captioning and always turning captions on
Making contents easy to read by setting clear font (sans-serif family, such as Arial with at least 12 point
Setting sufficient color contrast for contents
Ensuring links are descriptive

How accessible course materials benefit learners?
	Students with Special Educational Needs					All students
	Vision	Hand Coordination	Attention	Reading	Auditory	All students
Alternative format with screen readers / electronic braille
Alternative format with audio
Contents with sufficient color contrast
Semantic HTML / ePub format
Searchable course contents
Alternative format for responsive and mobile-friendly interface
Audio with closed captions

New Tool on Canvas

Blackboard Ally logo and accessibility meters

Starting from Summer 2020, Canvas users at HKUST can access Ally. It is a tool integrated within Canvas to help make uploaded course documents more accessible and provides:

Students with accessible alternative formats to facilitate learning
Instructors with immediate feedback and guidance on accessibility of their course materials

Instructor's Interface	Student's Interface

Upon upload of course materials to Canvas, instructors will find specific feedback and detailed guidance on the same screen about how to enhance the accessibility of their contents. The information is only available on the instructor interface. Time and resources can be saved to make immediate changes to content accessibility for all students.	On the course content page, just after the document link, users will find an Alternative Formats link. When selected, this link opens the Download alternative format dialog with different options. These alternative formats can be generated to OCR’d (optical character recognition) version for scanned documents, tagged PDF, Mobile-friendly HTML, Audio, ePub, electronic Braille for display and printing and Beeline Reader.