Making an accessible math course one step at a time
Working with Deb was awesome! From the beginning she had already selected a math textbook that was accessible and was ensuring her documents met at least basic accessibility guidelines. She even found an online homework platform that was accessible. That left us a lot of time to develop our approach to presenting the math in her course. Fortunately Canvas has the ability to render math written in LaTeX, a publishing format most often used for technical or scientific documents, so all she needed to do was copy the text of her documents into Canvas and mark them up using LaTeX. For the math quizzes and Quick Checks she was able to ensure the mathematical answer options were accessible by using MathSpeak or by placing them instead in the question area. And when she discovered bugs, either with the technology or the platform she had selected, she was always eager to work with us to resolve them.
It was also wonderful how she created several expandable details widgets to provide full descriptions of her videos. She communicated frequently with her student and with our department when any questions arose, and it showed—the end result was a clean looking, more accessible math course with all the resources in one place. I especially liked her novel idea of creating custom accessible calculators using Excel fitted to various problem sets, which helps students explore and better understand the math concepts. What a great example of proactive accessibility and a can-do attitude towards making math accessible!
Here are a few resources and tools we used to make this all possible: