Accessibility in the Classroom

There are a number of steps that academic staff can take to make the classroom experience more accessible for students. For instance, sharing your PowerPoint file in advance on Canvas can be beneficial to students who can jot notes alongside your slides. 

You may also find it useful to share live presentations over Office 365, where the student will see your presentation on their devices (e.g. phones, tablets, or laptops) and read live subtitles in their preferred language while you speak. These live subtitles are 'generated on-the-fly', and you can optionally display the subtitles below or above your slides on the lecture theatre's projector.

It's quick and easy to set this up, but note that you must access PowerPoint Live via the Office 365 portal rather than using the version of PowerPoint that's installed on lecture theatre PCs.

How to set up PowerPoint Live

1. You will need to have a PowerPoint presentation, saved to your OneDrive for quicker acccess. You can still upload slides from a USB key or from a file that's saved locally, but it might take a little longer to get started if you have large files.
2. Go to the Office 365 portal and login using your University of Galway credentials. In lecture theatres, you can use the quick link to staff email to get there faster. Note that PowerPoint  Live works on Microsoft Edge version 80+, Google Chrome version 72+, Mozilla Firefox version 68+, but Safari is not supported for presenters (it still works fine for audience members). We recommend using Google Chrome in lecture theatres.
3. In the app launcher (the nine dots on the top left corner when you log on), you should select PowerPoint from the menu.
4. Select the presentation you wish to share or upload using the link to the right of the screen.
5. When you've loaded the presentation, go to the Slide show tab and click the down arrow next to 'Present live'. Select who should be able to connect to this presentation (Only people in your organisation / Anyone). 'Anyone' is the fastest option for students to join your presentation.
6. Finally, click on 'Present Live'. The screen will show a customized URL or QR code that you can share with the students in the audience.
7. That's it!

Read More

A full illustrated guide can be accessed on Microsoft's website.