By Kate Cammack, CfT Co-Director
Do you give your student at least one .pdf in your course?
Me too!
In fact, I give them a lot of them.
And, you might have noticed that they are often flagged on Brightspace for accessibility issues.
Adam Hawkins taught me this very straightforward fix that (a) you can do directly in Brightspace and (b) takes a speedy, technology-is-amazing 1-3min per .pdf (in my experience thus far)
This is what you do:
Find your .pdf. Here’s the first page of a chapter that I scanned in as a .pdf
There are some clear jokes to be made here, about running from pain while working on Brightspace, but let’s move on.
Click on “Upload/create” and choose “Upload files”
Choose your file, upload it, and you should see it in your Brightspace folder like this:
The accessibility marker is at the right – sadly, the purple almost-circle means that it’s “thinking” about the accessibility, not that it’s “almost perfect.” If you click on it, you’ll see something like this:
Oh no!
No worries – here’s what you do!
Click the purple “Alternative Formats” button at the top-left of your screen. You’ll get a window like this.
Click “OCR Formats” on the bottom-right. Then, you’ll have a screen like this:
You’ll click “OCR Overlaid PDF”. When you hover over that button, you’ll see “generate”. Click that – it’ll take (literally) a minute, so let’s take the time to find out what you just did.
The “overlay” is a new, accessible file that Brightspace is making to go on top of your .pdf file. Think of it as an accessibility panini, being made just for you.
Once it’s done, the button will look like this:
You can download it if you want, but you don’t need to. Now, click out of this box, and go back to your main accessibility screen associated with that document.
See how there’s the button with three-dots? Click that, and select “Replace with Alternative Format.”
You’ll see a screen like this. And there’s your new OCR Overlaid Tagged PDF Panini Sandwich! Click the button and click “replace.”
Now, your accessibility score should look much happier!
Note here, that, in this example, I still have 193 remaining issues. It turns out that, on this .pdf, there was a bunch of tiny font in the references. I clicked “skip” at the bottom of this accessibility window, as there’s nothing that I can do about it, and I still got a 92% on this .pdf. So, don’t be worried about the number of issues that you have – apparently some issues contribute to your score more than others.
If you’d like help and/or want to work through this with someone, you have friends!