Towards Making an Online Access Maths Course Accessible to All

Abstract

The authors’ institution developed pre-COVID a suite of three access online maths courses, at SCQF levels 5, 6 and 7 (corresponding to the last 3 years of Scottish secondary school education). These courses were designed to be ‘do-it-yourselves’ and are entirely online. They have grown in popularity and have attracted a wide range of applicants from around the country, and beyond, as a way into higher education. The material was written before the maths education and support community started systematically investigating the issues of making mathematics digitally accessible, and therefore, did not implement any of the good practice that experts now promote. Guidance has been produced since, however, and as the institution received two expressions of interest from prospective students with visual impairment in the past two years, it was time to make the access courses accessible. This involved work with Word and LaTeX material, diagrams, figures, as well as hand-written material. It also required thinking carefully about approaches to teaching concepts of foundation mathematics to be understandable by a visual-impaired audience. In this paper, we describe the changes we implemented and formulate advice for the design of accessible foundation maths.