As you consider the accessibility of course materials your students interact with, there are two principles to consider. This page summarizes the principles while the next page provides details on how to enact these principles.

Use HTML Instead of PDFs

Use HTML or Microsoft Word (.docx) rather than PDFs if possible. PDFs – particularly those built from TeX or LaTeX source – are difficult to make accessible, as they often lack the internal tagging to work well with read-aloud tools. Rather than pdfs, try:

• HTML webpages, including Canvas pages and modules. In these online formats, there are two main ways to embed math and science formulas: as images or using markup languages (i.e. MathML or ChemML). Use markup languages for maximum accessibility (we’ll discuss how to do this on the next page).

  Here’s why: Mainstream assistive technologies can only read the content of images if they are described textually, i.e. in an alternative text (“alt text”) field, caption, or accompanying text. Markup languages, by contrast, can be read natively by assistive technologies if implemented correctly.

• Microsoft Word documents. Microsoft Word now offers a wide variety of ways to write or edit equations or formulas in documents. It has its own new equation editor, it properly renders equations entered as LaTeX or UnicodeMath, and it has an “ink-to-math converter” that will take handwritten input (via stylus or finger) and convert it to math notation. All of these options output formulas that can be read natively by assistive technologies.

Share Equations as Text Rather Than as Images

An individual using a screen reader will not be able to see the equation in an image. Instead of using images, add equations into your documents or Canvas pages as text or as text-based markup (such as MathML). More details on how to do that can be found on the next page.

If an image must be used, include a text alternative to fully describe the math equation/notation that is within the image. You can do this in any of the following ways:

• Add alt text to the image, if you can fully and concisely describe the image in a sentence or two.
• Fully describe the image content in the image’s caption.
• Fully describe the image content in accompanying text, and add alt text to the image indicating the description is in the accompanying text.
• Put the full description on a separate page, and hyperlink the image to the page with the full description.

Now that you’ve got the general principles or “rules of thumb,” let’s go on to look at how you can apply those principles.