Date of the Workshop: Monday 8 June 2026
Location: Edinburgh, UK
Number of participants: Hybrid workshop: 30 in-person + 74 online
Number of distinct organisations represented: 44
Introduction
There is growing interest in creating HTML content for mathematics to help meet legal accessibility requirements and provide flexible display options. It also allows the integration of new functionality such as quizzes and interactive graphics which bring valuable pedagogical opportunities. This hybrid workshop consisted of demonstrations and hands-on sessions for software tools which produce mathematical content in HTML, chosen for their technological maturity, accessibility features, and level of adoption. These include BookML, Chirun, Desmos, Quarto and STACK. The key objective was to give attendees the opportunity to see example applications of these tools in real contexts, as well as the time and support for them to try the tools themselves with their own work, in order to build enough confidence to get over the hurdle of not knowing where to start. Ultimately, the goal is to increase the numbers of users of this software and accessibility advocates in institutions across the country, in order to build critical mass.
Workshop Overview
To make sure the event itself was as accessible as possible, we decided to make it hybrid for both attendees and speakers; some speakers were present in person, and some were presenting remotely.
The morning consisted of 5 presentations, focused on each of the software tools mentioned above, given by either developers, contributors, or experienced users of each tool. The presentations were kept practical, with a focus on demonstrating relevant use cases in the context of teaching mathematics. In the afternoon, we had a session with a series of 8 lightning talks from attendees presenting their own use cases, including both further examples of the tools showcased in the morning and demonstrations of other tools relevant to different contexts. This was followed by a practical session, where attendees signed up to different small groups to get hands-on time with one of the 5 software tools presented in the morning, with support provided for each group by the speaker of the morning. Finally, the day concluded with a semi-structured discussion and Q&A, using questions collected throughout the day (on post-it notes in the room and also in the online chat) as prompts for discussion.
There were 30 attendees in-person and 74 online, with online attendees staying for approximately 4 hours on average (with 31 staying more than 5 hours, and only 4 staying less than 1 hour). The hybrid setting allowed us to welcome attendees from 44 different organisations (42 UK universities and 2 external organisations), most of them either lecturers/academics, teaching fellows, or learning technologists. We were three organisers on site to host and coordinate the event, with one specifically assigned to communicating with the online attendees to keep everyone included and engaged with the event, and being the “voice” of the online chat by reporting questions and comments to the event room. This was also helped by the event spaces being well-equipped for hybrid attendance, including small-group discussions.
Main Themes and Ideas
A key goal for the organisers was to make this explicitly a hands-on practice-sharing workshop, to give attendees a concrete starting point with software tools, rather than to use the time on higher-level discussion of general policy, accessibility issues, or institutional approaches; the workshop feedback indicates that this approach was welcomed by attendees, who appreciated both the practical demos and the opportunity to discuss technical questions with more experienced colleagues.
The key themes emerging in discussions with attendees were around making mathematics accessible for a range of different needs, learning technologies and maturity/user-friendliness of different tools, and departmental/institutional buy-in (or lack thereof) to give lecturers and learning technologists the appropriate means and resources to use these technologies.
Emerging Implications and Recommendations
The demonstrations and practice sharing showed that there are several software tools now reaching sufficient maturity to be usable at scale by lecturers and learning technologists to convert existing course material repositories (typically in LaTeX) to accessible HTML, albeit still requiring some level of technical knowledge to iron out details. The time and learning investment is still significant; departments with well-resourced learning technology specialist teams (familiar with discipline-specific practices, and with knowledge of relevant software, including LaTeX) are in the best position to deploy accessible teaching materials at scale, and individuals trying this from a more isolated position in their department/institution still face significant barriers to sustaining and spreading best practices.
There was ongoing discussion (and open questions) about systematic accessibility checking/testing of outputs, and participants highlighted a demonstration showcasing keyboard navigation and screen reader usage as being particularly useful; this suggests that a focus on accessibility testing for mathematics content could be welcomed in a future workshop.
There was also some brief discussions around using AI for accessibility purposes (e.g. feasibility and limitations around AI-generated alt-text for image descriptions; AI for handwritten or printed recognition of text and mathematical expressions), which we didn’t have much time to explore in detail; this could also be an interesting theme for a future event.
Resources and Links
All resources are linked from the workshop homepage here, including recordings of all the talks, and slides/resources shared by presenters and attendees.
Acknowledgments
This event was co-organised by Charlotte Desvages (University of Edinburgh) and Cordelia Webb (Imperial College London, chair of the JISC Maths Accessibility Group), with critical coordination support from Josh Fogg (University of Edinburgh). We thank the University of Edinburgh for providing the hybrid event space and organisation support. We thank the IMA-RSS-LMS HE Teaching and Learning Series and the University of Edinburgh School of Mathematics EDI committee for funding this event (catering, and travel costs for our invited speakers).
We thank our invited speakers David Hodge (University of Glasgow), Laura Midgley (Newcastle University), Steve Clower (Desmos), Sam Fearn (University of Durham), and Vincenzo Mantova & Robert Barham (University of Leeds) for their talks and tutoring for the hands-on sessions, as well as our 8 lightning talk speakers.
Conclusion
The event provided time, space, and support for attendees to get their hands on a number of software tools to produce accessible course materials. The showcase format of the talks, together with the hands-on time and discussions, were well-received by attendees, with the overwhelming majority of feedback respondents indicating that they felt more confident and were more likely to use these tools and to recommend them to colleagues after having attended the workshop. We hope that this experience will help further drive adoption of best practices for accessible maths across the country, and help consolidate and grow communities of practice for peer support around making mathematics accessible. We also hope that the success of this workshop will encourage the IMA, RSS, LMS (and other professional organisations and networks for mathematics) to provide further support for individuals, departments, and institutions/organisations to tackle accessibility barriers and foster more widespread adoption of best practices.
In terms of organisation/structure, the hybrid format was also strongly appreciated by attendants both in-person and remote, and allowed us to reach a much wider audience than in-person only. We would recommend that future workshop organisers dedicate the time and resources to host hybrid workshops wherever possible (equipment permitting), and that funders will offer appropriate resources to encourage and support this.
