College of Science & Engineering

Shazia Ahmed - Learning & Teaching Skills Co-ordinator

 I have been the Learning & Teaching Skills Co-ordinator in the School of Mathematics & Statistics since September 2019. It’s an interesting role that allows me to participate in many different aspects of teaching, learning and support within the School. This includes looking after the Maths & Stats Hub (a drop-in help room for pre-honours students), involvement with outreach activities, working with the senior advising team and, more recently, looking into the digital accessibility of learning materials within the School.

Why should we care about digital accessibility? Well, we are using digital and online learning materials more and more, and it is essential that students with disabilities get equal access to all resources. When we create learning materials, we need to ensure we are not disadvantaging students who rely on assistive technologies. Therefore, by removing barriers to student learning, we improve our students’ learning and show them that we care about their well-being, learning and overall student experience.

Creating accessible mathematical equations is technically challenging. Most mathematicians have a preference for using LaTeX. This is a powerful and efficient tool for typesetting mathematical text and is widely used by the STEM community. Although the PDF output from LaTeX gives a beautifully formatted document with the correct display of all mathematical notation in any operating system, it’s unfortunate that PDF files do not meet Accessibility Regulations 2018 accessibility criteria.

There are currently just three formats of mathematical text that are accessible: HTML (using MathJax to render the mathematical notation), Word and EPub3. I wouldn’t like to be in the same room as someone telling LaTeX users to use Equation Editor on MS Word! I should add, that it is fine to keep using LaTeX; in fact, PDF files should be made available to students as these are useful for printing and because they magnify well, visually-impaired students find these very useful. However, alternative formats such as HTML/ePub should also be provided in addition to PDF.

I am currently collaborating with colleagues at the Universities of Aberdeen and Glasgow Caledonian, with the support of the Scottish Maths Support Network, to address the issue of digital accessibility in mathematics (and other STEM subjects). We are aiming to create a bank of resources, provide training and the sharing of best practices to support colleagues across the sector in moving their learning resources into accessible formats primarily through the use of HTML and markup languages. If colleagues in the College are interested to find out more, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me.

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First published: 29 August 2023