This guide is for students, teachers, support staff and anyone else with an interest in digital accessibility.
The guide provides information on digital accessibility tools built into applications used at EUR, in EUR websites, in Canvas LMS and in EUR Library databases. Links included in the guide point to help pages from the makers of the assistive technology software. Often these pages are written in an accessible way. Links to videos point to video tutorials with closed captions. There are also links to download pages of selected apps.
The pages in this guide are organized according to assistive technology software: Accessibility built-in and Adjust your device, or activity; Read aloud databases, Reading, Writing, and Captioning.
Accessibility built-in lists accessibility features that are built into operating systems.
Adjust your device points to advice from AbilityNet's guide My Computer My Way on how to adapt your phone, computer or tablet to meet your needs. Highlighted are features for vision, hearing, cognitive and motor skills. Two screen readers, JAWS and NVDA, that you can use with Windows also get a mention.
Read aloud databases lists some databases available through the EUR library that allow you to listen as well as read texts.
Reading highlights some text-to-speech tools for listening to web texts or documents as well as tools to make reading web texts or epubs easier. There is also some information about Dedicon, a Dutch organisation that makes text and images accessible to people with a visual impairment or dyslexia.
Writing lists various tools you can use when writing as well as some accessibility checkers that you can use to make sure that all your readers can read your work.
Captioning talks about how you can activate captions in Chrome, in conference software widely used at the EUR; Google Meet, Microsoft teams, Zoom and in live PowerPoint presentations. If you are a creator of video content you may be interested in how to add captions to your videos in Panopto, Sharepoint or YouTube. Last but not least you may be interested in some free captioning software for adding and editing captions.
Julia Davy-Brown of the Library and Archive service at The University of Westminster created this guide to help with working online, and adjusting the technology to suit. She has kindly allowed the Erasmus University Library to adapt and share her guide with you.