Supporting and developing your digital accessibility progress.
How to celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) when we’re in the middle of assessments here at the University of York? Do it a week earlier when everyone can participate! 14 May saw us celebrating our inaugural University Accessibility Awareness Day (UAAD). We were excited to have Pro-Vice-Chancellor Professor Kiran Trehan start the day for … Continue reading Accessibility Awareness Day
To celebrate World Braille Day (4 Jan), we’re releasing this blog post about a workshop that we ran in October 2025, introducing staff to braille and ways to support our blind students who use braille at the University. Despite the prevalence of digital technologies, braille is still very important for literacy, to support multiple modes … Continue reading Braille and tactile materials to support Vision-Impaired students – workshop reflections
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
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
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
The Braille in Focus event in November 2024 was organised by the Scottish Sensory Centre to celebrate the 200 years since braille was created by Louis Braille in France. Apart from learning about the history of braille, it was an opportunity to meet with other people supporting blind students and to try out some of … Continue reading Reflections on the Braille in Focus event, Nov 2024, Edinburgh
Alice Bennett, Lilian Joy, Digital Accessibility Unit, University of York. Context Over 55 participants attended two workshops on Supporting Visually Impaired (VI) students held in September and October 2024. These workshops were the first of their kind run at the University of York, so were a little experimental. The workshops were instigated by a simple … Continue reading Reflections on our Supporting visually impaired students workshop.