Accessible mathematics course material with Chirun
Christian Lawson-Perfect
Newcastle University
Towards improving the accessibility of the mathematical sciences for visually impaired people, University of Glasgow
Chirun
A tool to produce accessible course material from LaTeX or Markdown source.
Design
- Aim: least effort for lecturers
- Ideally self-service
- Best possible accessibility
- Package up entire courses, not just single documents.
Idea
- Input: LaTeX or Markdown source
- Add: structure information
- Output: HTML and PDF documents
Features
- Accessibility options
- Choice of formats
- Download a copy
- Vector images
- Jupyter notebooks
- Embed videos, Numbas exams, any other web content
- Slides in slideshow and document format
Problems still to solve
- LaTeX package support
- Beamer slides
- Annotation
Online builder
Upload your source material and build it online.
How we got people to use it
Lecturers didn't take accessibility seriously.
- We had strong support from the head of school and director of education.
- Paid students to type handwritten notes in LaTeX.
- We offered lots of support.
- I started auditing our Canvas modules.
- I started badgering lecturers.
Now two-thirds of modules have all material in accessible formats; most of the rest use PowerPoint exclusively.
Thanks!
- Website
- chirun.org.uk
- msp.digital.learning@ncl.ac.uk
- Source code
- github.com/chirun-ncl
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