Accessibility

Under the Finnish Act on the Provision of Digital Services (306/2019), higher education institutions have a legal duty to ensure their digital services and content meet accessibility requirements. This also applies to publicly share learning materials.

Why is accessibility important?

Accessibility is important to provide everyone equal and easy access to digital content regardless of disability (such as a hearing or vision impairment or reading, learning or cognitive difficulties) or personal abilities (such as the level of proficiency in the Finnish language). 

Accessible content benefits all users. It improves usability and increases search engine visibility.

What types of learning materials must be accessible?

All learning materials that are publicly shared must meet the accessibility requirements. This applies to all types of learning materials, including, for example, PowerPoint presentations, videos, Word documents and PDF files.

In this context, the term “publicly shared” means that content or materials are made available via a digital service that requires no login. As the intranet of Tampere Universities can be accessed by a large number of users, materials published on the intranet are also considered to have been publicly shared. However, content shared on Moodle is not publicly shared if users must log in to access the content.

The accessibility requirements do not apply to all learning materials:

  • If you share learning materials via Moodle with a limited number of users on a short-term basis, the materials do not have to meet the accessibility requirements. If the use of the materials continues for a longer period, they must meet the accessibility requirements. 
    • Short-term use = a period of up to 12 months.
    • Limited number of users = users must log in to access the materials.
  • Video content published before 23 September 2020 does not need to be captioned.
  • Live streams and recordings that are made publicly available for no longer than 14 days do not need to be captioned.

How do I ensure my learning materials are accessible?

Videos

When you publicly share a video, you must add captions in the same language as the spoken audio within 14 days of posting the video. Subtitles in other languages are not required.

  • Panopto, Screencast-O-Matic and YouTube are equipped with a speech recognition tool that you can use to automatically create captions for your video.
  • However, you must check the automatic captions for accuracy and make the necessary revisions before publishing them.

Read the instructions on the intranet for creating video captions lock

PowerPoint presentations and Word documents

As editing existing documents to ensure they meet the new accessibility requirements takes a great deal of work, we recommend copying the content to the accessible document templates of Tampere Universities lock.

  • Copy the original content and paste is as plain text to the document template; then you can edit the document by using the formatting styles. 
  • End by checking your document using the accessibility checker available in MS Office.

Instructions for creating accessible MS Office files lock

eOppiva’s tutorial video for creating accessible documents (in Finnish)

PDF files

  • You can use the PAVE tool to check whether your existing PDF documents meet the accessibility requirements.

Accessible colours

The Word, PowerPoint and Excel templates of Tampere Universities comply with the accessibility requirements. When you draw up charts and figures, make sure the colours you use are accessible.

Read more about accessible colours lock

More information for Staff

Instructions for creating accessible materials are available on the intranet. lock

You can discuss accessibility and ask questions via Teams on the Saavutettavuus (Accessibility) channel of the Verkkosivut ja intra (Websites and the intranet) group. Join the group with the code a wxhhrbq.

Links checked 11.1.2022