The Accessibility Filescan block was developed to help determine how friendly course PDFs are to assistive technology such as Read & Write, Kurzweil, screen readers, and various other tools students might use to help them consume course readings.
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This tool is not a guarantee that a document is fully accessible; it is a useful indicator of how much of your course material may be friendly to assistive technology. |
To access the Accessibility Filescan (and all other) blocks, open the "block drawer" on the right of your Moodle course. Please see Moodle Blocks for more thorough information.
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A PDF file stores information about the language of the document. This is used by screen readers and other assistive devices to ensure proper pronunciation and is particularly important for documents that are in foreign languages. See: Changing the global language of an Adobe PDF | Swarthmore ITS Solutions.
Text
If a PDF file does not have text, the file has been scanned as an image. This means that screen readers and other assistive devices will not be able to read the content. As of fall 2023, our current goal is to strive for green checks under both the "Text" and the "Tagged" columns on all documents (except where files are legitimate images not images of text).
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Use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract the text from the image of the document. Here are a few options:
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For existing PDF documents, upload your file on the convert inaccessible course material page and choose the accessibility conversion option. It is possible to select multiple documents to be converted at one time. You will receive the converted document(s) via email within a few hours.
For newly scanned documents, all department Canon multifunction machines have been set to automatically scan documents using OCR.
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Scanning tips: Make sure your scans can be seen by everyone Not all documents can successfully be made accessible. Consult this guide on high-quality scans from the University of Washington to understand what makes a scan able to be seen and read by most people. A high-quality scan contains
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To check that your scan was OCR'd, try copying some text from the document and pasting it into Word. If you can successfully paste the text you copied, your document has been OCR'd, but you should check a few things:
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