This article is the fourth in a series of six articles about accessibility issues in e-learning.

Sometimes staff have complained about the limitations of formatting text in HTML without the advanced skills that many website designers have.  Using the text editor available in Blackboard, you do not have full control over the appearance of the text, though you can change many elements.

Example of text as an image

To help with formatting the text, some staff use image creating tools to edit their text into a more visually appealing format.  The end product is an image which looks nice but is not accessible to many disabled students.

Why is this an issue?

Some students, such as those with visual impairments or dyslexia, need to modify the text and background colour to help them read the text more easily.  Other students increase font sizes when viewing pages to help with reading small text.  When you have text that has been formatted in Blackboard or inside a Word document, then students can override the default formatting choices to fit their own preferences and needs. However, when text is saved as an image, then those preferences cannot be applied to the text and colours inside the image.  This can mean that the text inside the image becomes unreadable or invisible to some disabled students.

What can you do?

Use the text editor in Blackboard, or format text in products such as Word and PowerPoint, which have good accessibility support. Please do not use images to format text.

A future version of Blackboard will contain an improved text editor which gives users more control over how the text is formatted.