YuJa Panorama is a powerful tool to improve accessibility in Brightspace course materials. This article highlights the features available to faculty to ensure their courses are accessible and inclusive for all students.
In this article:
Why This Matters: Benefits for You and Your Students
YuJa Panorama scores the accessibility of a Brightspace course based on a scan of the documents and pages within the course. Instructors can make improvements to their documents and monitor how these changes affect the course accessibility score. What Panorama does for instructors and students:
- Gives instructors real-time feedback on accessibility
- Provides guided fixes for common accessibility issues, all within Brightspace
- Offers students alternative formats (e.g., audio, ePub, tagged PDF)
- Helps meet legal compliance standards
An overview video is available on the Panorama site.
Course Accessibility Report
From the navbar of your course, select "Course Tools." On the Course Tools drop-down, look for "Accessibility Check - Yuja Panorama." Clicking this item will open up the course accessibility report dashboard, and it will automatically create your Panorama instructor account. It is important to do this first, before attempting to use any of Panorama's other features.
The default view should be the course accessibility report for whatever course you’re in. If you’re an instructor for more than one course, you may have to choose from a list of your courses. The Course Accessibility Report includes a number of widgets:
- Overall Accessibility Score: The overall accessibility score for the selected course.
- Total Files Processed: The total number of files processed for the selected course.
- Files Improved Using Panorama: The total number of files improved when using Panorama's Accessibility Reports for the selected course.
- Alternative Formats Downloaded: The total number of alternative formats downloaded for the selected course.
- Cumulative Accessibility Score: Your course's cumulative monthly accessibility score. Results can be filtered by file type.
- Files Processed By Document Type: The total number of documents processed by Panorama for the selected course.
- Alternative Formats Downloaded by Format Type: The total number of alternative formats downloaded by students for the selected course.
- Content and Issues: View all files and their accessibility scores processed by Panorama, or change the tabs to view accessibility issues and the number of occurrences for individual file types.
The Course Report Dashboard. Widgets have blue numbers that correspond to the list above.
Accessibility Scores and Icons
YuJa Panorama automatically assesses and scores items listed under the “Content” area of your course, including files you have uploaded, as well as pages created within Brightspace.
Types of files and issues checked
Panorama checks and scores the following file types: PDF, DOC, DOCX, ODT, RTF, PPT, PPTX, ODP, HTML, XLSX, XLS, ODS, and GIF.
Panorama checks for specific accessibility issues in each document type, and some issues are rated as more severe than others when calculating an accessibility score. A full listing of the issues checked in each document type is available in the YuJa Knowledge Base.
Icon meanings
When looking at the course content listing, you will notice accessibility icons to the right of each file or page. These icons have different colors and shapes to reflect the accessibility score of that file.
- 85% and over is a High Accessibility Score and is represented by a green hexagon.
- 60-84 is a Medium Accessibility Score and is represented by an orange triangle
- 30-59 is a Low Accessibility Score and is represented by a red pentagon
- 0-29 is a Very Low Accessibility Score and is represented by a maroon curved octagon
Important! The color-coded icons are only visible to instructors with YuJa Panorama accounts. Students will see a blue circle accessibility icon for all documents, with no indication of accessibility scores.
If you are an instructor but you only see the blue circle icons, it's because your YuJa intructor account has not been created yet. Go to Course Tools in the navbar and select "Accessibility Check - Yuja Panorama." This brings you to the course report and automatically creates your YuJa Panorama instructor account. When you go back to your course content, refresh the page, and the color-coded icons with scores will now show.
Clicking on an icon will open a new menu, called the Alternative Formats menu.
Alternative Formats Menu Overview
The Alternative Formats menu opens when the accessibility icon is clicked for any document or page in the course content. Included on the Alternative Formats menu are the following:
- Accessibility Report
- Alternative Formats
Document Accessibility Report
In the top row of the Alternative Formats menu, an accessibility score will be shown as a percentage on the left. On the right will be a colored gauge icon with a number in a small black circle. The color corresponds to the accessibility icon colors detailed above. The number in the circle is a count of the accessibility issues found in that particular document.
Please note: Students have access to the Alternative Formats menu but they will NOT see the accessibility report at the top.
Clicking on the Accessibility Report row at the top of the Alternative Formats menu will open up the detailed Accessibility Report, where each accessibility issue can be explored and, in many cases, fixed. In this view, the document will appear on the left and the report details will appear on the right sidebar.
Sections in the sidebar include, from top to bottom:
- The document accessibility score and issue severity counts
- The “Review Issues” panel
- The “Update Document” panel
Document Accessibility score and issue severity counts
The top row of the sidebar is a series of circles with numbers. From left to right:
- Overall accessibility score percentage for the document. Hovering over the information icon next to the score label will bring up details on how this score was calculated.
- Count of minor issues in the document
- Count of major issues in the document
- Count of severe issues in the document
- Total issues in the document
You can filter the list of issues shown underneath by severity, by clicking on the minor, major, or severe counts, as shown below.
To-Do List
On the far right of this top row, there is a stacked dots “More Actions” menu. Clicking on it will bring up several additional options. Most are self-explanatory, but the first choice of “Add To My To-Do List” will save this document in a list that can be accessed later. This may be helpful if you run out of time before you can fully address the issues in a document. You can easily find it again later in your To-Do List.
Where to find your To-Do List: From the Brightspace course navbar, select "Course Tools." From the Course Tools dropdown, choose "Accessibility Check - Yuja Panorama." Alternatively, go directly to YuJa Panorama and use your Binghamton credentials for the Single Sign On (SSO).
In the left menu, the To-Do List is the second option from the top.
Reviewing and Fixing Issues
Each issue is listed in the “Review Issues” panel. If there are more than three issues, use the page numbers to advance through all issues.
Selecting an individual issue in the list will locate that specific issue in the document shown on the left.
Many accessibility issues can be fixed immediately through Panorama’s Full-Circle Remediation. If the issue has a “Fix Issue” button with a wrench icon, it can be fixed directly in Brightspace using Panorama.
Note: See a
list of all issues and whether they can be fixed in Panorama’s Full-Circle Remediation engine or must be fixed in the source program.
Click each “Fix Issue” button to bring up a guided fix for that issue. Always save your changes before closing out the guided fix.
When fixes are pending, they will show below in the "Update Document" panel. You can apply any pending changes by activating the “Apply Changes” button in the bottom right of the sidebar. Congratulations! Your accessibility score will now improve!
Edit the Original File and Re-Upload the Fixed Version
If the “Fix Issue” button is missing for any given issue, instead click the “Learn more” link for that issue. It will bring up detailed text and video instructions for how to fix the issue in the source program for the document (Word, PowerPoint, Acrobat.)
Once you make your fixes in the source program, use the “Update Document” function to replace the file in Brightspace. Congratulations! Your accessibility score will now improve!
Important! Don’t make more work for yourself. If your document has a combination of issues that can be fixed in Panorama and issues that must be fixed in the source program, we recommend doing the source program fixes first. Use the accessibility checkers in Microsoft apps and Adobe Acrobat. Then re-upload your document in Brightspace.
What Are "Reading Order" Issues?
PDF and PowerPoint files will have a “check reading order” minor issue for every page or slide. Only a person can judge if a document’s reading order is logical or not. The “Fix Issue” button in this case is a prompt for the document owner to confirm a logical reading order. This can be done in the source program or by testing the document with a screen reader.
If you know your document has a logical reading order, check the box for “Verify reading order.” You can also check the box for “Add change to all instances of this issue” to take care of all pages and slides at once. Congratulations! Your accessibility score will now improve!
HTML Pages and Module Descriptions: Reaching the Document Accessibility Report Through the Page Editor
In addition to using the accessibility icons detailed above to reach the document accessibility report, HTML pages and Module Descriptions offer another way: through the page editor. If you have the page editor open for any HTML page, there will be a gas gauge icon with a number count in a black circle. Clicking on the gas gauge icon will open up the detailed accessibility report.
Likewise, modules that have content in the "description" also contain HTML. Clicking anywhere in the content of the description opens up the page editor with the gas gauge icon. The accessibility score and detailed report for whatever content is in the description of the Module can be reached this way.
Alternative Formats
Back to the Alternative Formats menu, underneath the first row accessibility score, there are a number of alternative formats available for download. These alternative formats will be available to students. For example, if a student wants to listen to a document during a commute, they can download the MP3 format.
A detailed explanation of each format is available in the Panorama Knowledge Base.
Important! Alternative formats are not a magic wand to fix accessibility issues. A document that starts out with a poor accessibility score will generally result in poor-quality alternative formats. The burden for making documents accessible must not be put on students!
What are OCR Formats?
One of the alternative formats worth calling out is “OCR Formats.” OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. This means that images with text in them can have the text recognized and pulled out as real text.
If any of the PDF documents in your course have the severe issue “The document is scanned,” you may want to try generating an “OCR Reconstructed Tagged PDF.” Scanned PDFs are essentially one big image of text, but OCR can pull the text out.
After you’ve generated an “OCR Reconstructed Tagged PDF,” go back into the Accessibility Report (top row of menu). On the “Update Document” panel there is a stacked dot “More actions” menu on the right. Choose “Alternative Format” from this menu. On the pop-up screen, all of the alternative formats you’ve generated for this document will show in a list. Select the radio button for one of them, like “OCR Reconstructed Tagged PDF,” for example. Then use it to replace the original scanned PDF. Congratulations! Your accessibility score will now improve!
Please note: The OCR Reconstructed Tagged PDF" format may not have the exact formatting of the original scanned PDF. To better preserve formatting, try "OCR Overlaid Tagged PDF" instead.
How to Disable Alternative Formats
Instructors have the ability to disable alternative formats for a specific document, or for the entire course.
Important! We do not recommend disabling alternative formats at the course level. These formats are a helpful feature for students.
However, there are use cases where certain formats should not be available. For example, the language translation formats should not be available to students in a foreign language course.
Toggling off all formats for a specific document
All Alternative Formats can be toggled off at the bottom of the Alternative Formats menu for each individual document.
Toggling off specific formats at the course level
To turn off a specific alternate format for the entire course, under Course Tools in the navbar, select the "Accessibility Check - Yuja Panorama" option. On the left menu, expand “Configuration” and then select “General Settings.”
On the Course Settings tab, there are Alternative Formats Menu Options where each individual format can be turned off for the entire course.
DocHub: Cloud-based Document Storage and Alternative Formats
The DocHub is a platform for accessible document storage that allows users to upload and store files in the Panorama Cloud. Users can generate alternative formats, share files via email and synchronize their accessible content across multiple devices. There are two ways to reach the DocHub: through Brightspace and through Binghamton's Yuja sign in page.
From Brightspace
Select "Accessibility Check - Yuja Panorama" under Course Tools in the navbar. Then, on the left navigation menu, the top item is the DocHub.
Yuja Sign-in Page
You do not need to be logged into Brightspace to access the DocHub. Simply go to Binghamton's YuJa sign in page, and use Single Sign On (SSO). Enter your Binghamton credentials.
Watch an overview video of how to use the DocHub.