Accessibility in Brightspace

All the materials we share with students on Brightspace and other learning platforms are subject to the Accessibility Act, whose fundamental goal is that students with disabilities should be able to access the content in educational materials.
Students with hearing impairments should be able to read everything, students with visual impairments should be able to hear everything, students with dyslexia should be able to have text material read aloud digitally, etc. Read more about accessibility concerning video, audio, images, and texts.

As an instructor, you should consider that:

All curriculum materials must be searchable, highlightable, and digital so that students with disabilities can use screen readers on their computers for reading and copying. As an instructor, you can, for example, download PDFs from digital libraries instead of scanning texts yourself, write text instead of inserting screenshots into PowerPoints or documents, etc. Read more about how to ensure text accessibility.

Choose videos that are already captioned (in the original language) so that students with hearing impairments can follow and understand the academic content. If you produce the video yourself, you can use the built-in captioning feature in Panopto.

Students with visual impairments must be able to navigate documents and access all content with their screen reader. As an instructor, you should ensure that the content has an accessible and understandable layout, for example, by using heading styles instead of bold text, using bullet points, and describing what a link refers to. Also, try the Accessibility checker on your content in Brightspace.

Audio material must be transcribed so that hearing-impaired students can access the content. Typically, students can have audio material transcribed themselves with the help of the SPS-program. As an instructor, you should therefore give hearing-impaired students access to the audio material well in advance before it is to be used.

Below you can find guides on how to ensure that your content meets these needs.

1. Make content accessible in your text

This guide shows you how to check if a PDF complies with accessibility requirements.

2. Subtitles on videos

These guides show you how to add subtitles to a video in Panopto and how to edit them afterward if they don't quite fit or if you need to change the language of the subtitles.

This guide shows you how to edit subtitles/captions on videos in Panopto. By default, all videos with spoken content will have Danish subtitles.

This guide shows you how to change the language of a folder so that the videos that are uploaded to the folder will have subtitles in the language that is also spoken in the videos.

3. Improve your layout

This guide shows you how to use the built-in accessibility checker in Brightspace and how it can help you optimize your layout to make it more readable for people using screen readers. When you optimize your layout, it also becomes more readable for students without visual impairments.

4. Transcription of audio files

This guide shows you can upload you audio file in Panopto and make captions for it.

Revised 28.06.2024

AU Educate