Supporting and developing your digital accessibility progress.
The Digital Accessibility Unit is 1! We were formed in late 2024, so we’ve just completed our first full year and wanted to share a few stats and highlights from our first year: Our linktr.ee/DigAccYork has our key links including our Bluesky account (@uoydigacc.bsky.social). We work closely with other teams in the Student Success Unit … Continue reading 2025: Our Year in Review
We often look for national or international days (or weeks, or months) we can tie in with to help promote our work as the Digital Accessibility Unit, as well as awareness of tools, training and services around digital accessibility. So as November rolled round, we knew UK Disability History Month was the next big calendar … Continue reading UK Disability History Month 2025
The Jisc Accessibility Community ran a Drop-In on the 1st October entitled ‘Braille Matters’. We had a very enlightening presentation by Elizabeth McCann from the Scottish Sensory Centre, introducing the history of braille and why it is still important despite the prevalence of digital technology. I was invited to give my perspective as a learning … Continue reading Braille Matters
17 September 2025 saw me visiting the University of Coventry for the Enhancing Inclusion for Neurodivergent Students in Mathematics and Statistics workshop. This was held in collaboration with the University of Bath and funded by the London Mathematical Society (LMS). The event was held at the Library, a wonderful building with silent and group study … Continue reading Enhancing Inclusion for Neurodivergent Students in Mathematics and Statistics
As we head towards the start of semester, it’s a good time to prepare for our students. There will be lecturers new to teaching students who are vision-impaired (VI). This blog post aims to review the tips, support and resources available to help you with your teaching. 1. Make digitally accessible resources The first step … Continue reading Preparing to teach vision-impaired students
The digital accessibility conference, DigAcc25, that took place in June 2025 continues to resonate with me. This blog post is a delayed reflection on the event; by writing about it, it’s also an opportunity to review what I learned and how I intend to take any ideas forward in the year ahead. Organised by the … Continue reading Reflections on DigAcc25
“Who watches the watchmen?” is a famous question. Less well known but also worth considering is “How accessible is accessibility training?”. To improve digital accessibility in society, we need as many people as possible to engage positively with training and adopt more inclusive habits and accessible practice. Therefore accessibility training needs to be accessible in … Continue reading Making accessibility training accessible
Tactile resources are useful to supplement the digital versions of resources, enabling a student to use multiple senses to understand the data, patterns and connections. In Part 1 of our Tactile Graphics blog series, I was just starting to tackle the heatmap resource shown below. Lots of digital tools are good at providing data through … Continue reading Creating tactile graphics for VI students – part 3
Tactile resources and alternative formats This is the second blog post about our efforts to find alternative formats to make teaching materials accessible to visually impaired students. Previously on this blog, Lilian’s blog post focused on the challenges of expressing different kinds of graphs in tactile formats, a common problem in supporting visually impaired students … Continue reading Creating tactile graphics for VI students – part 2
Alice and I form the digital accessibility unit at York. Disability Services often refer students to us for additional digital skills support. We also offer support to the lecturers who are working with these students, some of whom have severe visual impairment. We had a discussion about our experience so far this academic year on … Continue reading Creating tactile graphics for VI students – part 1