Supporting accessibility and engagement in the teaching spaces in Sloane Robinson Building

Supporting all students to hear

Many of the teaching spaces in Sloane Robinson Building are large, and students may not always have a direct line of sight to the lecturer, or to other students who may be asking questions or presenting. To support audibility for all students, and to improve the quality of re/play recordings and captions, please ensure that you use the lapel mic while teaching. You will also need to either repeat student questions into your mic before answering, or ask students to use the roving hand-held mic.

Hearing loops (induction loops)

Each teaching space is fitted with a hearing loop. In some of the active learning rooms this is only available on one side of the room, to avoid clashes with nearby rooms. In this case, signs on the walls and/or under group screens will indicate which areas are covered by the hearing loop.

Captions for deaf students or those with hearing loss

The teaching spaces in the Sloane Robinson Building are designed to facilitate interaction and active learning, and therefore don’t use the traditional layout with all students facing the same way, and the lecturer facing back. This means that students who normally lipread will struggle to find a seat which reliably gives a good view of the lecturer’s face. For such students, we would recommend the use of live captioning software such as Caption.Ed, which shows automatically generated captions on a students’ personal laptop or phone in real time. Please encourage any deaf students who do not already have access to this software to contact the Student Disability Service to obtain a licence.

Font sizes on slides

Because of the distance from the back couple of rows of seats to the screens opposite in the Bill Brown Forum, use a large font size on slides and avoid overcrowding them with text or detailed diagrams. We would recommend a font size of at least 18 pt, and ideally 24-32 pt.

Use of cameras in the Bill Brown Forum

As you may have seen on induction tours, the Bill Brown Forum has four cameras, which use the microphones suspended above the central teaching space to follow the speaker. These cameras have primarily been installed to facilitate hybrid sessions, for example bringing in a virtual visiting speaker, or for recording conferences and other events. They are not used by default in lecture recordings – the default Re/play template records whatever is on the screen (usually your slides, a computer screen you’re working in, or the document camera); plus audio. For most teaching purposes, you are unlikely to need to display the camera feed on the main screens, meaning that neither you nor you students will be recorded on video.