Making Moodle more accessible - a student guide to Yuja Panorama for Moodle

What is Yuja Panorama?

Yuja Panorama is a new accessibility tool for Moodle. It allows students to access alternative formats for the content lecturers have uploaded to their Moodle course and for lecturers to check the accessibility of their content.

Overview of alternative formats

When you access your Moodle course, you will see a small blue person icon to the right of any files which can be converted to alternative formats (labelled as “alternative formats” for screen readers). This tool allows you to personalise content depending on your requirements.

Open

Alternative Formats button

1. If you are using a browser with a pop-up blocker, ensure this is turned off for LSE Moodle (moodle.lse.ac.uk).

2. Click on the “alternative formats” icon to the right of the file you wish to access.

3. A pop-up menu will appear. This will allow you to download the original file (“source file”) but also access a variety of alternative formats which you can convert the file to depending on the format of the original file.

Accessing different formats

Open

Pop-up menu displaying “Alternative Formats” for a PowerPoint File

When choosing an alternative format from the menu, some formats will download to your device whereas others will open in a new browser tab. For more information on the various options, please see the section below.

Overview of alternative formats

The menu that appears will offer a variety of alternative formats for you to view the content in. If you click to the right of the file on the menu, you can generate, view or download the alternative format.

• Source File: View the document in its original format, suitable for download viewing.

• PDF: View the document in PDF format, suitable for both online and download viewing.

• Immersive Reader: Customize text sizes, font types, themes, and highlight parts of speech such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. The Immersive Reader offers many more customizable options for students to explore, such as Line Focus, Picture Dictionary, and Translations. Students will have the flexibility to adjust these options and follow along with the text reader.

• Text File: View the document in a pure text format without any formatting styles, suitable for both online and download viewing.

• EPUB: View the document in the ebook format, suitable for any ebook reader application.

• Braille: View the document in the braille format, suitable for download viewing (a braille reader is required).

• Audio Podcast: Audio playback for documents, suitable for both online and download listening. 

• Language Translation: This option allows you to convert text in the original file to numerous languages. The translator has a very high accuracy rating.

Immersive Reader

The new Immersive Reader merges the former “High Contrast” and “Text to speech” alternative formats and provides many more customisable options too. These are outlined below.

1. When viewing the Immersive Reader, it will open in a new tab in your browser. When clicking the play button at the bottom, the text from the file you have chosen will be converted to speech. In addition, if you click the speaker icon, you will have the option to change the Voice Speed and choose a Female or Male voice to read the text.

2. Furthermore, you also can set text preferences by clicking the “AA” icon in the top left. Here you can choose the text size, increase line spacing, select a font and a theme (background and text colour) according to your personal preferences.

3. To the right of the text preferences button, you have access to Grammar Options. Here you can choose to highlight syllables and parts of speech and also show labels for these.

4a. After the grammar options, you have the button for Reading Preferences. Line Focus allows you to choose how many lines to focus on. The picture dictionary allows you to see picture definitions when you click on a noun. Finally, the translate option allows you to convert the text to multiple languages.

4b. Below is a screenshot of the picture dictionary, which provides picture definitions for nouns.

4c. Below is a screenshot of an example translation in Burmese for a whole document.