MAGIC lectures
Pre-recorded lectures/podcasts
- All lecturers are asked to provide the option of captioning or sub-titles for any pre-recorded
material provided for MAGIC courses from September 2020
- Any students experiencing difficulties accessing pre-recorded content will be asked to contact
the MAGIC Project
Coordinator, Sam Blackburn
or the course lecturer.
Recordings of live MAGIC lectures
- Lectures with live audiences that are recorded are provided with automatic captioning, and
lecturers are requested to provide additional lecture notes wherever possible.
- Zoom automated captions will be used for recordings of live lectures.
Guidance for lecturers
From September 2020 we need to adhere to the UK Accessibility Regulations (2018) by ensuring that any
pre-recorded material provided as part of MAGIC course delivery is fully accessible to all
subscribers.
We are therefore asking that lecturers ensure that any pre-recorded material is captioned/sub-titled or
has a written transcript available. Most universities will have similar requirements. There are various
resources available that can help with this. This includes:
- Uploading pre-recorded lectures to YouTube which can provide
automatic
captioning
- If your institution uses a systems such as Panopto, this has a built in automatic captioning
feature
- These systems allow for editing of captions to improve them, if necessary.
Web standards compliance
Valid XHTML and CSS
Our pages are written in valid HTML5 and styled using valid CSS3 code.
We validate our pages regularly to ensure this standard is maintained.
Accessibility
The University of Exeter recommends compliance with the WCAG 1.0
AA standard, and this
is the standard we
apply to our site. Some of the guidelines require interpretation and we have used informed judgement to
implement them with the needs of users foremost in mind.
We have working methods in place to try to maintain this level of accessibility.
Any students experiencing difficulties accessing pre-recorded content are asked to contact the
MAGIC Project
Coordinator, Sam Blackburn
or the course lecturer.
WCAG2.0
We are planning our transition to WCAG
2.0
.
Standards and guidelines do not necessarily address all accessibility problems, so we particularly
encourage anyone having difficulties using our site to contact us
directly so we can fix any outstanding problems.
Comments on any matter concerning these pages, including the accessibility of our pages, can be sent to
our MAGIC Technical Officer,
Fraser Murray
.
Navigation aids
We have incorporated the following features into this site to help you find your way around:
Site map
If you are having any trouble locating the information you are looking for, a full site map
is
available.
Breadcrumb trail
We provide a breadcrumb trail feature above the main content of each page to show you the path from the
home page to where you are in the site.
Links
We try to ensure all our link text is written to make sense out of context.
We have used title attributes where appropriate to give further information about the target of a
link.
Access keys
Due to the current lack of a consistent standard for the implementation of access keys, and the resulting
unreliability in the way they work, we have decided at this stage not to include them on our pages.
We do however feel that they are a useful idea in principle, so we will monitor developments on this issue
and hope that in due course a standard will be agreed within the web community, at which point we will be
willing to adopt it.
In the meantime we will be happy to hear any views you may have on this subject.
Visual design
Presentation
We use stylesheets for visual layout combined with structured markup of headings, paragraphs and lists to
separate content from presentation.
The content of our pages is still readable if stylesheets are turned off or unavailable.
We have used relative font sizes on our pages to ensure text is resizeable in visual browsers.
Images
All content images have alt text providing equivalent text to describe their function.
Purely decorative images have empty alt text, i.e. alt="", which means screen readers
ignore the images completely.
Browser compatibility
We test our pages to ensure the information they contain is accessible in a range of different browsers as
well as with screenreading software.
By adhering to web standards we avoid the use of features specific to one browser. If you experience
problems whilst using assistive software to access our site, please do contact our
MAGIC Technical Officer,
Fraser Murray
.