Make your course materials accessible with Panorama

If you’ve been wondering how to be more inclusive when creating files and ensure your materials meet accessibility standards, Panorama is your new best friend.

Panorama is an accessibility tool that has been available on UM Learn since 2022. Now it’s also being relaunched as a password-protected portal, which means you can also review documents for accessibility outside UM Learn. You just log in to Panorama using your UM password—which means that UM staff and students can now also use it for any materials they produce.  

It’s the law 

As of May 1, 2024, the University of Manitoba must abide by the Accessible Information and Communication Standard Regulation—part of the Accessibility for Manitobans Act. The regulation states that educational institutions and other bodies must, among other things, make educational materials accessible.  

How Panorama helps you 

Panorama checks how accessible your materials are and provides suggestions for improvement.  

Panorama scans your content and creates an accessibility report that flags any issues and provides suggestions for how to resolve each of them. This allows you to ensure the accessibility of your content before it is distributed or published. It can also create accessible alternative formats for your users who have disabilities and different abilities, including high contrast, text to speech, braille, and audio files.  

The Panorama platform also includes Panorama’s PDF Remediation engine, which uses AI to address issues such as contrast, font size, alternative text, missing headline structures, hyperlink context issues and more.  

You are the only person who can access your accessibility reports—no one else will see or evaluate you on them. The product has been vetted by UM’s Access and Privacy Office and Information Security and Compliance. 

To access Panorama, log in to the Panorama portal with your UMnetID and password. 

Learn more from The Centre 

The Centre for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning is your campus resource for accessibility. Visit Panorama on The Centre’s website for more information about this tool.

Training 

An online workshop, Panorama – Improving Digital Accessibility, is being offered Wednesday, September 25 from 12-1 pm. This workshop will be facilitated by YuJa staff and will cover how to use Panorama to scan courses and documents and automatically improve the accessibility of digital media and course content, identify and fix issues for a variety of file types.  

Training topics: 

• Accessibility Reports 

• • Finding Accessibility Reports for Documents 
  • Understanding Accessibility Reports
  • How to Improve Files 

• Alternative Formats 

• • Overview of Alternative Formats 
  • Understanding Different Types of Formats 

• Accessing the Panorama Reporting & Panorama Settings 

• • How to access Course Reports 
  • My Content Area 

You can also book an appointment with the media team at The Centre for help to make your course materials or other digital content more accessible. Please email us at TheCentre [at] umanitoba [dot] ca.  

Support 

Panorama is a YuJa Inc. product. If you have questions about Panorama, you can visit the Panorama Digital Accessibility Platform Overview on the YuJa Help Center website where you’ll find video tutorials, quick start guides and general documentation.  

You can also contact YuJa Inc. directly between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.: 

By phone: 1-888-257-2278 

By email: support [at] yuja [dot] com 

Through Twitter: @yujanow 

The Centre for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning