Alternate Format FAQs for Faculty

A: No. The Alt Format team has experts in the highly technical fields of digital accessibility and braille transcription. We request access to your course materials in advance so you can focus on teaching your course, and we can focus on making those materials accessible.

A: Screen readers are excellent tools, but they cannot access all content. In particular, screen readers are often unable to read PDFs at all because many PDFs are images of text rather than actual text on a page; screen readers cannot interpret images. In addition, screen reader users usually navigate documents using keyboard commands rather than a mouse. This requires that a document has functional headings that allow it to be navigated without the use of a mouse or visual input. The Alt Format team is trained in how to make a documents screen reader accessible.

A: The answer will depend somewhat on the specific student but, broadly, they access information through other senses. Most commonly through touch (like braille or tactile graphics) or hearing (like screen readers or exam readers).

A: We request materials early because creating accessible versions of materials is highly technical and time consuming. This work is done manually, requires high attention to details, and needs to be proofed. In addition to the complexity, we are concerned about timing of student delivery because it would not be equal access if a blind student is only able to receive materials several days after other students receive them.

A: This is a conversation we have with each student for each of their classes. Different students will prefer different formats; different types of materials within the same class may require different formats. For example, a student may receive problem sets in braille, but lecture slides in HTML.

A: We most often produce braille and tactile graphics, accessible DOCX documents, HTML, and accessible PDFs. We may also use less common formats for fields with specialized communication systems, like music.

A: Stanford’s Site User Guide has a helpful article about writing alternative text (alt text). Alt text is a text-based alternative to visual content. To write helpful alt text, we encourage you to focus on what the purpose of the image is and what you are hoping students will take away from it. Because teaching teams are the experts in the content, our alt text will never identify the purpose of the image as well as yours.

A: Absolutely! However, as with other kinds of content, it helps us if we have access to it early so we can send it out to an audio description service. An audio description will include both the original audio of the video and a description of what is happening visually in the video.

A: Yes! Your content belongs to you, and we love when faculty want to use the accessible copies of their content moving forward. We will evaluate things like content from textbooks or journals that are published by outside sources based on copyright restrictions, but if you wrote the content, we are very happy to provide it back to you for your use in the future.

A: For digital distribution, we create a private Canvas page for each student and share accessible files there. For braille and tactile graphics, each student has their own shelf where we place braille copies of course content. For exams, we will coordinate with teaching teams to deliver the exam securely via email or by scheduling for a TA to pick up a braille copy of the exam at the OAE office.

A: We can schedule electronic documents to become available to students at the same time as the rest of the class will receive them. We use Canvas pages to distribute most materials to students, and frequently schedule documents to be published at a specific time. 

Braille documents can be more complicated, as we can only deliver hard copies during business hours. If the rest of the class is receiving access to a problem set on Sunday at 12pm, for example, we would put the braille copy of the problem set on a designated shelf for the student at the end of the day on Friday. We trust students to follow the Honor Code and not open the document early in such situations. 

A: We take file security very seriously. We save files to a Google Drive which has been vetted by Stanford for high risk data. Only members of the Alt Format team have access to this drive. The Alt Format team are full-time, professional University employees. On occasion, we utilize graduate student workers who have limited access to course content. When transmitting files we are similarly careful to use methods that are secure and unlikely to result in files being inappropriately distributed to outside sources.

A: While we do keep up to date with evolving technologies, and do sometimes reference alt text created by ChatGPT, it cannot reliably or consistently create accessible documents, especially in braille. When we do use ChatGPT, our settings are configured so the data we input is not used to train the LLM and remains private to our team.