Important technologies - A glossary

Below is a list of key technologies that either students may use, or that we as instructors should know about when designing materials universally. What is a screen reader, for example. What is OCR processing? Where can we find tools for accessibility checking?

Screen reader

A screen reader is a software program used by blind and visually impaired people (or other groups) to interpret the information shown on a computer screen. This interpretation can be presented to the user via a braille display or via synthetic speech.

When you add alt text to an image, the screen reader uses that text to convey the image’s content. If the screen reader reaches a link it will convey the link text, which therefore must clearly indicate the link’s target. If it reaches a heading, it will be confusing for the user if that heading is an H4 when the previous heading was H2. (Where is the content under H3?)

Most operating systems (Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and others) now include a built-in screen reader.

There are also several external screen readers, both free and commercial, which can be downloaded from the web. These often have more and more advanced settings than the built-in ones.

Braille display

A braille display is a technical-mechanical device that converts data from a screen reader into braille (tactile) output. The braille display consists of a number of cells (20 to 80) placed next to each other, where each cell represents a letter or symbol. In addition, the display has buttons to enable navigation within the text.

Users of a braille display can access the content of a text by reading the tactile braille with their fingertips.

The braille display can only reproduce letters and symbols. Therefore it is important that teaching materials are designed universally so that non-text content also has an alternative text, documents and web pages have correct formatting tags, and so on. Then the screen reader can interpret the content correctly and send it on to the braille display.

En hånd som leser på en leselist

Speech synthesis

Speech synthesis refers to text-to-speech systems that allow a computer to read written text aloud. This technology has become common in smartphones, computer operating systems and apps that can be downloaded for free. For text to be read correctly it is important that it is also structured, formatted and coded correctly, as you learn in this course.

Braille (tactile writing system)

Braille is a script consisting of cells with small, raised dots that can be read with the fingertips. A cell consists of six dots, three high and two wide, and can represent a letter or symbol. On a braille display the cell is extended to eight dots in order to reproduce uppercase and lowercase letters as well as special characters.

To read content displayed on a screen, a screen reader is used to send data to a braille display, which then converts the data into braille.

Alfabetet med punktskrift (Braille)

^{Excerpt of the braille alphabet}

Hearing loop (AFIL)

A hearing loop (AFIL) is an assistive technology for people with hearing loss that transmits sound directly from an audio source (microphone, media player) to a hearing aid. A perimeter loop consists of a cable that is installed around a room, for example an auditorium, and transmits the sound from the audio source to the hearing aid via a magnetic field. An FM-based loop transmits sound via an FM transmitter.

The hearing loop

Reduces background noise
Delivers clear and distinct sound directly to the hearing aid
Allows the user to adjust the volume individually

As an instructor you should therefore always use the microphone and sound system installed in teaching rooms.

HTML

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is a markup language used to develop and display web pages. The language is built from tags that either wrap text elements or mark a point in the text.

The tags define the type of content and what the text refers to. A paragraph is marked with <p>, an image with <img>, a level 1 heading with <h1>, and so on. For example:

<h1>This will appear as heading 1</h1>
<p>This is a paragraph</p>

A rich text editor, like the one you find in publishing systems such as Canvas, Vortex, Inspera and Nettskjema, encodes the content you enter with valid and correct HTML. The code is read by browsers, screen readers and other technologies, and must be correct for content to be robust and rendered properly in a browser. Therefore it is important to use the editor’s built-in tools and features when creating web pages (pages, articles, assignments, announcements, and so on).

HTML was introduced in 1993 and is today the de facto standard for web pages. The standard is maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (w3.org)

OCR processing

OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. OCR is a technology that converts images of text, for example a scanned PDF, into machine-readable text. OCR-processed text can also be selected with a mouse, edited and made searchable.

A scanned PDF must be OCR-processed to meet accessibility requirements. OCR-processing a scanned PDF document is something you can do with Anthology Ally. See the PDF page in module 4. Both students and staff can also download PDFs from Canvas by using Ally. This download causes the PDF to be OCR-processed.

If you convert (save) correctly from a universally designed Word document to PDF, you avoid having to OCR-process the document afterwards. The document structure and tags from the Word document are preserved.

Accessibility checker

An accessibility checker is a tool built into most relevant applications that reviews content and flags any accessibility issues in the document or web page you are working on. The accessibility checker can usually be opened in a separate dialog window and provides suggested fixes and shortcuts to resolve the issues. Often the checker runs automatically in the background and marks issues as you edit the document or page.

Accessibility checking is built into, among others,

Microsoft Word
Microsoft PowerPoint
Canvas
Vortex
Nettskjema