Perusall is committed to making our social learning platform accessible to as many students as possible.
Perusall's Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT version 2.4, updated June 28, 2024) provides detailed information on Perusall's support for accessibility standards.
Perusall has several features that can be leveraged to increase accessibility of reading materials and assignments to students:
- The ability for instructors to upload materials in PDF or EPUB format in addition to the textbooks available from publishers. Instructors can easily make alternate versions of materials available to students with particular needs. Instructor-uploaded materials are made available to students at no cost to the student. (Instructors should ensure content uploaded is accessible.)
- Students can have course materials read aloud to them from within Perusall without having to use specialized screen reader software.
- Resizable and responsive user interface components, and zooming or resizing to change text size within the reading materials.
- A "dark mode" with a darker user interface that is more readable in low light conditions.
In addition, users can enable a number of accessibility options in their own profile settings:
- Use Open Dyslexic Font for reading when possible: For reflowable books, Perusall can replace the default font with the Open Dyslexic Font for users with dyslexia.
- Increase color contrast for increased visibility: This option increases color contrast between foreground and background colors in a number of places in the user interface.
- Do not automatically hide alerts after a few seconds: By default, alerts that pop up in the upper right corner of the page will disappear after a few seconds. Users that want more time to review alerts can enable this option so that alerts will not close until the user clicks the close button or presses Escape.
- Disable built-in keyboard shortcuts: If Perusall's built-in keyboard shortcuts conflict with shortcuts that other applications on your computer use, this option can be used to disable Perusall's shortcuts.
- Hide video player controls while video is playing: By default, Perusall will show the video controls at the bottom of the screen during video playback, so users can see where in the video timeline comments have been left. However, if the video is produced with captions then the video playback bar may hide them. When this option is selected, the video player controls will hide when the video starts playing; moving the mouse or stopping the video will cause them to be shown again.
- Do not automatically hide the toolbar when reading a document to maximize screen real estate for reading: By default, as you scroll down in a document, Perusall will temporarily hide the toolbar so as much of the screen as possible is used to display the document text. If you use a screen reader or otherwise prefer that the toolbar always stay locked into place, you can enable this option so that the document toolbar is always visible.
- Do not show avatars of other users who are viewing the same materials I am: Enable this option to hide the avatars (images or initials along the left side of the page) of other users looking at the same content as you are, if you find this distracting.
- Render highlights with more transparency for increased visibility of the underlying text: If you find highlighted text hard to read, enable this option to increase the transparency of the highlights.
- Do not automatically play animated GIFs: If you prefer reduced motion on the screen, this option will not start playing any animated GIFs until you click on it.
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Invert colors of books and documents when running in dark mode: By default, even when running in dark mode, Perusall will display content from books and documents with a light background as that is typically how those documents were designed to be rendered. However, if you enable this option, Perusall will invert the colors on such materials so that they render with light text on a dark background. Note that the colors of images will also be inverted, but in many textbooks you can click on an image to pop out a full-size view of the image in its original colors.
Some additional considerations are important to ensure that text- and video-based materials are accessible; see the articles How do I use scanned documents in Perusall? and How do I use video in Perusall?
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Additional support articles: