To welcome our new and returning students at City, the DA team ran a short prize draw In September and October. Students were invited to complete the first course topic on our Introduction to Accessibility Moodle module and share some feedback on their impressions. Provided they did the above, they were entered into a prize draw to win one of three City hoodies! Thanks to the incentive of glorious, branded goodies, we have had lots of engagement from students on the course.

The prize draw winners are Shakiba Adinehvand, Amal Gohar, and Zaamin Valjy! Congratulations 😊

The module is open to all staff and students for self-enrolment and can be completed at your own pace, so do have a look, even if we are out of hoodies!

Alternative formats on Ally

In case you have been wondering what the icon next to some Moodle resources is, it is City’s new assistive tool, Ally.

Ally converts resources into different formats. These alternative formats are created automatically and do not require any extra actions from lecturers. They benefit all students by offering a choice of how to engage with resources, such as:

• The ability to adjust text, font and background
• A preference for listening with an adjustable playback speed
• A preference for reading, highlighting, bookmarking and notetaking
• Mobile device adaptive/responsive

Alternative formats take a few minutes to be ready. Students can choose from a range of alternative formats according to their preferences, including OCR PDFs, Tagged PDFs, ePub, BeeLine, Immersive Reader, HTML, MP3, and Electronic Braille.

You can find support and guidance on using Ally alternative formats on Student LibGuides.

Caption.ed

We’d love to remind students that City now has Caption.ed, an assistive tool that offers instant, machine-generated captions, transcripts on the go, and note-taking. The tool can follow user activity across multimedia – from a YouTube tutorial to a Lecture Capture livestream, and more.

The tool is being piloted from September 2022 to May 2023 and is supported on desktop and mobile only. The browser extension is not supported at City.

If a student requires access to Caption.ed, the Disability and Neurodiversity teams can allocate an account to you. A licence can be requested via the teams’ general enquiry forms. Alternatively, contact the teams via their email, phone or locations details available on the Student Hub.

You can find support and guidance on using Caption.ed on Student LibGuides.