How to Make Your Course More Accessible with Yuja
Yuja-Panorama
YuJa Panorama is a tool that improves the accessibility of digital media and course content. This tutorial will demonstrate how to use Yuja within your course.
Accessibility Icons
Next to items in your course (Assignments, Files, & Pages) you will see 1 of 5 different accessibility icons.
- The red octagonal icon indicates that item has a low accessibility score.
- The yellow triangular icon indicates a medium accessibility score.
- The green hexagonal icon indicates a high accessibility score.
- The green thumbs up icon indicates an accessibility score of 100%.
- The purple circular icon indicates the item is still being processed and has no score.
The icons and scores are only seen by the instructor(s) of a course. Students will only see a blue circular icon. Students can click this icon to receive your content in different formats. You can learn more about that in this article: Alternative Formats: Change course content to suit your needs!
Improving Your Accessibility Score
Improving your score is really easy and Yuja will help you do it! Click on any of the Accessibility Icons in your course (even the green ones) to see it's current score and how you can fix it.
First you'll see the Alternative Formats Menu. At the top you'll see your Accessibility Report Score and a gauge with number indicating how many things can be updated. Below that are buttons to generate alternative file types. When students click the accessibility button they will see all these file options, but not the Accessibility Report.
Click on the Accessibility Report to see your document and what needs improving. Below we can see that this page has 2 Major issues; in this case both issues have to do with the contrast of text color in the page. This is a really easy fix and it's actually something that Yuja can do for you! Click on Fix Issue to see what Yuja recommends changing and if you're satisfied click Add Change, then finally Apply Changes. Your updated document will be viewable shortly after.
Next we'll look at a document that can't be fixed automatically. This is a scanned PDF with an Accessibility Score of 0. Almost all scanned documents will have a score of 0 until the content has been OCR'd. OCR stands for "Optical Character Recognition." It is a technology that recognizes text within a digital image. Right now as far as a screen reader is concerned this is a blank document.
You can close the Accessibility Report and return to the Alternative Formats Menu. Click OCR and then OCR Overlaid Tagged PDF. This will start using OCR technology to generate a screen reader friendly PDF.
Once that's done you can now View or Download the new PDF. If you click View the PDF will open in a new tab and it will look the same but the document now has text data and you can highlight the words.
Download the new OCR PDF then go back to the Accessibility Report and Drag & Drop or Choose Media to Upload. After choosing the new PDF click Update.
As you can see our newly updated PDF has a much higher Accessibility Score. There are still some minor issues but unfortunately being a scanned document we can't fix the font size.
