Matthew Deeprose, accessibility and edtech presentations, blog posts, and projects

PanoptoText: Download Text / Captions from Panopto

Panopto won't let you download captions or a transcript. This bookmarklet makes it possible.

Democratising Digital Accessibility: AI-Enabled Tool Development for Barrier-Free Content Creation

A presentation for the DisabilityNow event organised by University of Southampton

Using generative AI to improve digital accessibility efficiency, featuring , Copilot, Whisper, and Claude

An updated version of the previous presentation. As well as a summary of workflows I've discussed before, I look at how AI helped me to create web-based resources that can help make certain accessibility workflows more user-friendly.

Harnessing Copilot and other gen-AI tools to increase digital accessibility efficiency

Can generative AI save time and effort for certain digital accessibility workflows? This is an extended version of a presentation I gave at the July 2024 International Ally User Group.

International Ally User Group: sessions, slides and recordings

I'm co-chair of the International Ally User Group. You can view a list of our sessions, slides and recordings.

Identify the 'unsafe html' content from an accessibility report in Blackboard.

Sometimes the accessibility report in Ultra refers to "UNSAFE_HTML" files, yet it can be hard to work out what they are because there is no preview. This solution will list any UNSAFE_HTML files listed in an Ally report and their direct links to open them in the browser console.

Accessibility Beyond Borders!

What did we learn from accessibility leaders at six global Higher Education institutions? This April, more than 100 people from around the world attended the International Ally User Group's first online panel discussion. They listened to the experiences of six accessibility experts from six institutions in six different countries. Up for discussion were five themes relevant to digital…

What one thing can IT staff do to improve accessibility?

What’s one activity that everyone who works in an information technology related field could do to make a difference to digital accessibility? The answer could be right in front of you as you read this: your keyboard.

How can we correct captions and create transcripts at the University of Southampton?

Captions on videos benefit everyone. It’s important that captions are accurate and follow good practice. Learn how to improve captions using University tools.

How did we make the University’s Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) submission more accessible?

A case study with examples of improving document accessibility. This is based around the work I did on improving the accessibility of the University of Southampton's Teaching Excellence Framework submission.

Making accessibility easier

My presentation to the European Ally User Group, sharing: what I learned while designing a session about writing alternative text for complex images like graphs and charts, an approach to making on-brand colour contrast easier, turning the Microsoft Accessibility inspector on by default. Implementation plan, and the start of communicating the change.

Better content, made easy: using the accessibility inspector in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel

In this session we introduce the accessibility inspector in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The accessibility inspector: identifies possible improvements you can make to the accessibility of your documents runs whilst you’re working will show you how to make your document more accessible.

Use group policy to set the Microsoft Office Accessibility Inspector to "check while you work" by default

The Accessibility Inspector in Office is a useful tool that helps content creators identify accessibility potential improvements while they create content in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The tool does not run by default. A user has to follow three steps to turn it on. To promote the use of this tool we arranged to have the accessibility inspector run by default on University-managed desktops and…

UoS Brand Accessible Colour Suggester

I created this simple tool that ranomly chooses a set of colours from our corporate brand that all meet accessibility guidelines for contrast. This was an interesting learning experience to help me learn a bit more about Javascript and ARIA. I hope to spend some more time improving this for a future more extendable iteration.

Two steps forward? Making accessibility easier.

The UCISA-UX team asked whether we "made something easier for everyone to use"? In this five-minute slot I will share two topics on that theme: Brand colour contrast made easy Accessibility inspector for everyone

Download Blackboard Collaborate Videos, even when downloading not enabled.

Course instructors may forget to allow recordings of their Blackboard sessions. In this post I share a workaround to get you the mp4 of the recording for offline usage.

What is alternative text? How do I write it for images, charts, and graphs?

What do we mean by alternative text? Who is it useful for? What strategies can we use for writing it? How might we write alternative text for more complex images like graphs, flow charts, and venn diagrams? I attempt to explain in this video. It was recorded live as a webinar for the University of Southampton's Office 365 Community. I've included the questions and answers from the session.

Sustaining accessibility efforts through accessibility-related appraisal objectives

How can IT departments sustain their accessibility efforts? While there are vital procedural and technical answers we should also consider the importance of cultural change. In this presentation, Tamsyn Smith and Matthew Deeprose will discuss early work on embedding accessibility within appraisal objectives.

PowerBI: Accessibility Tips

What can we do to make our PowerBI reports more accessible? In this 20 minute presentation I explain the four principles of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and how they relate to the creation of PowerBI reports.

The impact that high quality mark-up can have on accessibility, performance, and discoverability

Going beyond accessibility checklists, you may quickly get bogged down with technical details and acronyms that you feel you may never understand. In this fast-paced 30-minute presentation I use worked examples, with screen reader demonstrations, to cover topics including: -semantic landmarks --using ARIA attributes to improve the screen reader experience -respecting motion and colour preference…

Interview with textBOX

TextBox are well know for their accessibility work, most recently the ASPIRE awards. Huw Alexander from TextBox invited me to do an interview for their Lunchbox series.

Accessibility Newsletters and Blogs

I've compiled a list of accessibility newsletters and blogs.

iSolutions Digital Accessibility Community of Practice: what did we do in 2021 and what was the impact?

Making IT accessible for all!

Recent experiences have demonstrated that University staff and students expect to use online resources with a variety of devices, making full use of accessibility features such as reflow, captions, and text-to-speech. Such features benefit everyone, but especially the increasing proportion of university students who self-report a disability. University Information Technology departments know they…

Accessibility Allies Resources

We share these materials as part of our presentation Accessibility Allies at the University of Southampton. The content may contain errors or omissions. We share this on a best-efforts basis.

Worldwide Digital Accessibility - 001 - Just sit down and do it!

Not a presentation as such, but the magnificent Cam Beaudoin invited Peter J. Jonas and I to take part in the first Worldwide Digital Accessibility vodcast.

Accessibility Allies at the University of Southampton

The University of Southampton introduced Blackboard Ally (a tool that provides insight into an institution's accessibility) in Summer 2021. To support the rollout, five student interns were employed over the summer as “Accessibility Allies”. In this webinar, the University's Digital Learning Team shared how they organised the project and provided information about the work undertaken by the…

Accessibility does not impede agility! Six ways that Digital Accessibility maps to Agile Practices

A common misconception is that Digital Accessibility slows down and impedes IT development process, making them less agile. In this post we cover six aspects we learned in our Agile training course and how they relate to accessibility.

Three ways PowerPoint’s "Design Ideas" excludes your audience, and how to fix it.

PowerPoint’s Design Ideas feature helps us create attractive slides quickly. Unfortunately, some of its suggestions do not follow accessibility best practice, creating barriers that may exclude members of your audience. In this blog post we explain three issues and how to fix them.

Toward amazing accessibility!

IT departments in the Higher Education sector and elsewhere know they must commit to accessibility, but how can we take this ambition and embed it within our operations? Within the University of Southampton IT department (which is named iSolutions) senior leadership committed to delivering "amazing accessibility" but has not yet set out how this might happen. In this internal presentation within…