Beyond Alt Text: Making Notation, Diagrams, and Symbols Accessible with AI
November 6 @ 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Part of a six-session series from University Online Education Services (UOES), in partnership with TIIP. Each session consists of 60 minutes of content followed by a 30-minute work session.
Accessibility’s hardest problems live wherever a field has its own visual or symbolic language — equations, flow charts, syntax trees, structural formulas, supply-demand curves, choropleth maps, IPA transcription, music notation — and other notation and diagrams that experts read differently than they’d ever say aloud, locked inside images and invisible to assistive technology. These are the materials that take longest to make accessible, across every school and discipline, and they’re the ones the April 2027 deadline will reach last. This session uses AI to address exactly those cases, drawing examples from across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences alongside STEM: converting equation images, structural formulas, and syntax trees into accessible, screen-reader-renderable notation in Canvas; generating narrated walkthroughs of flow charts, process diagrams, and decision trees; and producing audio descriptions of technical and disciplinary figures. Live screen-reader demonstrations show the difference between an accessible figure and an inaccessible one, and the 30-minute work session lets you apply the workflow to a piece of your own content, from any discipline.
This session fulfills Competencies 1, 3, and 4 of the Teaching and Generative AI Pathways Program and is open to Rutgers University staff and instructors of all ranks, appointment types, and disciplines.
What to bring: A unit, equation set, or technical figure from your own course.
Questions about the Teaching with GenAI Faculty Workshop Series? Email Rick Anderson, Director of Emerging Technology at UOES: rick.anderson@uoes.rutgers.edu