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March 23, 2026 With the help of Gemini and the Google suite, coding workflow automations is more accessible than ever! In this workshop, Laura Thapa explains how to use Gemini, Google App Scripts, and Google Studio to automate repetitive processes that bog down your work day. Use this guide to get started creating automated workflows for your everyday tasks.

March, 18, 2026 Ever wonder what a screen reader says when it hits an image in your course? In this 15-minute interactive lunch and learn, we’ll demystify alt text. We’ll look at real-world examples of "good" vs. "bad" descriptions and provide a quick "how-to" on writing effective alt text that conveys meaning without the fluff.

You may have heard the buzz about accessibility lately. Maybe you heard about the federal regulations  around Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act or maybe you are just tired of students complaining that they can’t read the PDF you uploaded for them. Whatever the reason you are here, welcome!  Eastern is taking the opportunity this hubbub has created to make our content more accessible. We are including accessibility training in our faculty onboarding process and has been hosting a series of lunch and learn sessions on different aspects of digital accessibility. If you missed a Lunch and Learn session, you can find the recording on CTLT's website . If you are interested in attending a future Lunch and Learn, check out our schedule .  The following article is taken from the updated FDC 100, part of our faculty onboarding. It focuses primarily on the why of digital accessibility aspects. For how-to guides, please visit the Brightspace Accessibility Checklist .  Accessible Course Design When we build our courses, it’s easy to look at accessibility as just another compliance box to check off. But honestly, it's so much more than that. It’s about making sure every single student logging into our course has the exact same opportunity to learn, engage, and succeed. When we design with accessibility in mind from the start, we actually end up creating a more intuitive and frustration-free experience for everyone. Please bookmark the   Brightspace Accessibility Checklist . You can use this checklist as a quick reference while you build or review your course content. If you get stuck and need an example or step-by-step technical instructions for any of the items, check out the How-To Guides section at the bottom of the document! Let's take a look at a few core practices from the checklist and explore why  they make such a massive difference to our students' day-to-day lives. Many of these "rules" of accessibility are there specifically to help students who use assistive technologies, special tools that take content that can be easily seen and heard by many people and convert them to a new format that can be perceived by individuals with disabilities. Check out this video of Carin , a Brightspace user who uses a screen-reader, a tool commonly used by blind individuals to navigate the internet. The video has an older view of Brightspace, but it shows how a screen reader interacts with the Brightspace environment. It illustrates why many of the practices below are so important. 📖 Accessible Text In the above video, we saw how Carin's screen reader interacts with text. In order for her screen reader to work properly, the content of the page needs to have appropriate "tags" that let Carin navigate the page. These tags act like a table of contents, allowing Carin to skip to the main content of a page, or a specific section of text. That's why it's important for us to use: Descriptive page titles Proper heading and list structure Descriptive text for links Correctly formatted tables and layouts Set the correct reading order for slides. Other factors that affect the accessibility of text have to do with making sure those with low vision or color vision deficiency can read comfortably. That's why we want to: Use high contrast colors such as black text on a white background Avoid making color the sole indicator of meaning. You probably wouldn't accept a student paper that looks like the one shown on the right, and your Brightspace page shouldn't look like it either. Academic standards like high-contrast black text and left-justification exist to make reading effortless. Beyond just font choice, proper headings can act as a roadmap for your content, allowing readers to scan the page and helping screen-reader users navigate directly to the information they need. The goal of formatting is to provide a clear, logical structure that prioritizes the reader. 📷 Accessible Images Thinking back to Carin's example again, now we want to think about images. What will happen if Carin's screen reader encounters one? When a screen reader comes across an image, it can't see the image like we do and make meaning of it. It needs someone to tell it what it is looking at. That's where alt text comes in. Alt text is a way we label images. We describe to the screen reader what we want it to see. Much like a podcast host does for their audience. But not every image needs to be described. The screen reader doesn't care about your decorative fall leaves on your fall free days page, but it does care about that important graph showing the weight of the major assignment categories in the course. So how does it tell which images are important and which are not? We tell them. In tools like Brightspace, we can either add alt-text when we upload an image or mark an image as decorative. Marking an image as decorative tells the screen reader to skip over it. When we add alt text, we tell the screen reader what to say to the student, so it is important that we get it right. Check out   WC3's Alt Text Decision Tree  to help you determine if your images need alt text. Finally, we want to consider image resolution. Some individuals (myself included) zoom in on the screen to see it better. Best practices say we want viewers to be able to zoom in by up to 400% before the image starts getting grainy. This can be especially difficult when using images of text, so we recommend you avoid them when possible. Pause and Reflect We have gone over a lot of ideas so far in isolation but rarely do we only have an image or only have text, so let's take a moment to see what some of these things look like when they are put together. Images aren't just pictures; they include things like diagrams and charts. Take a look at the two charts below and notice the differences. They show the same information, but they have different color contrast, different labeling systems, and different alt text. Since alt text isn't something we can see on the screen, I have added a caption to each image, quoting the alt text provided. "Bad" Image Example Alt text provided: The dark red section shows that poorly scanned PDFs are less than 1/4 of the accessibility problems that drive Alexa crazy. "Good" Image Example Alt text provided: Pie chart outlining the accessibility problems that drive Alexa crazy. Poor color contrast is the number 1 problem, making up over 40% of the issues, images without alt text coming in closely behind it at just over 30%. Other issues cited in the graph include poorly scanned PDF (15%), files without proper heading structure (9%), and videos without captions (1.5%). 🎧 Accessible Audio Carin's screen reader converts text to audio, so audio must be the most accessible of all content types, right? Wrong. Think about individuals who are deaf or have a hearing impairment. How will they access the content? I'm so glad you asked! We need to provide the audio in a different format -- text. We do this in two ways: captions and transcripts. Captions are text that appear on the screen as someone is speaking. A transcript is a written document that contains all of the captions from a piece of audio. The good news is, as long as you make captions using one of Eastern's video hosting platforms (Panopto or Media Library), a transcript file will automatically be created for you! 🎥 Video: Putting it ALL Together Often video content combines text, images, and an additional factor -- audio. We are off to a good start with practice putting text and images together... Now throw out most of what you know. When we get to video, that changes things. Unless you are providing your slides to students (which, I recommend you do) your alt text and file structure isn't going to make a difference within a video itself. Here we are going to rely on the visual and auditory elements. But what if someone has a disability that affects one of those senses? That's where best practices come in! We don't need to worry about putting alt-text on images, but we should instead verbally describe the image in the video. Imagine you are giving a podcast, and your listeners cannot see your slides. It's important that you give them the necessary information in your talk. This will be picked up by the captions for learners who are deaf or have a hearing impairment. A Special Note on PDFs PDFs are a difficult document type to make accessible as they are usually created in an inaccessible way. Check out the   CTLT's Lunch and Learn session on PDFs  to get more detailed information. Here are some key things to note: Born-digital documents are preferable to scanned PDFs, so check with the library to see if we have access to an eBook. If you are scanning a PDF, it needs to go through optical character recognition (OCR). That can be done during or after the scan. If you are converting a digital document (such as a syllabus or slides) to a PDF, you need to follow the above directions for text and images AND export, download, or save as a PDF. If you are given a "Print to PDF" option, do not use it; that will flatten all of your hard work into an image that does not recognize any of the "tags" or elements you previously worked so hard on. Final Thoughts Carin's screen reader is just one example of an assistive technology someone might use. There are many others out there, but you don't need to know them all. The important thing to remember is this: we used Carin as just a case study for this lesson, but following the principles listed above will make your content more accessible for all of your students, not just those using a screen reader. Enjoy this article? Read the rest of this issue of the Flex Gazette!

Google Workspace Studio is a tool that connects different Google apps to perform tasks automatically. It uses Gemini AI to help you create workflows between Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Drive without needing to write code. How to Access Studio button in Gmail From the web studio.workspace.google.com   Starting a New Flow Describe your goal:  Type what you want to happen in plain English and Gemini will build the flow. Use Templates:  Select from a list of pre-made setups for common university tasks. Custom Flows:  Link specific apps together so that an action in one app triggers a result in another. 3 Practical Ideas to Test 1. Save Email Attachments Automatically Trigger:  You receive an email in Gmail  with an attachment. Maybe try with a specific label. Action:  Workspace Studio saves the file into a specific Google Drive folder . Result:  Your files are organized in Drive without you having to download and move them manually. 2. Create Documents from Form Submissions Trigger:  Someone submits a Google Form . Action:  Workspace Studio takes the form data and places it into a Google Doc  template. Result:  You get a formatted document for every response received. 3. Send Emails Based on Spreadsheet Updates Trigger:  You add a new row of information to a Google Sheet . Action:  Workspace Studio drafts a pre-written email from your Gmail  to the address in that row. Result:  You can contact a list of people by simply updating a spreadsheet. Watch and Learn! ▶️ Watch : Get started with Google Workspace Studio  and How to use variables in Google Workspace Studio 📃 Read : Google Documentation- Workspace Studio 👉 Try : Workspace Studio Guide Don’t know where to start with automation or AI?   Reach out to Laura to talk about workflow automation and getting your process AI-ready! ✉️ / 💬 laura.thapa@eastern.edu 📆 Booking Calendar : 45 and 15-minute options Enjoy this article? Read the rest of this issue of the Flex Gazette!

Attention undergraduate flex instructors! We are pleased to announce a new Brightspace integration designed to streamline how students access their digital course materials. This will be in all undergraduate SP2 courses! This same information will go out in the Flex Gazette, so instructors have it too. What is changing?   We have implemented the My Materials link to simplify the student experience. Instead of Brytewave or Kortext, students will see "My Materials" in their content section. This will open in a new link that hosts all of a student's eBooks in one place. Will this platform be an improvement over the previous system?  I certainly hope so! In this new platform, students can access both Brytewave and Kortext books in one place. This eliminates the confusion of switching between different platforms depending on the title. When should students use the "My Materials" link?  My Materials should show all eBooks previously provided via Brytewave or Kortext. Please note that if a course uses a specific homework platform (such as Achieve, MindTap, Pearson MyLab, etc.), students will still need to access those directly through the course content as they have done in the past. How does this affect traditional students?  Traditional students will have the option to purchase eBooks through the My Materials page (hosted by the Bookstore) that will appear directly in the My Materials platform. As always, they are free to purchase their books from other providers if they choose. Those books just won't show up in the My Materials platform. Enjoy this article? Read the rest of this issue of the Flex Gazette!

In this Issue: Learn about My Materials, a student-side update in textbook access. Explore Google Workspace, Gemini's latest integration. Investigate accessibility requirements, discovering how to make your courses well-suited to all students. Read the Flex Gazette in it's entirety below!

February 25, 2026 Is your audio and video content truly reaching every student? We will focus on the essentials of video accessibility. We’ll demonstrate how to quickly add and edit closed captioning and explain the importance of audio descriptions for visual content. The session will conclude with a live Q&A and hands-on support to help you ensure your course videos meet accessibility standards.

February 18, 2026

In this Issue: Learn how to use Gemini directly from your favorite Google tools. Send announcements to students' emails directly from Brightspace. Stay up to date about new changes to our faculty training Brightspace courses. Navigate your courses and Harmonize discussions with ease. Get information about Academic Coaching for your students. Learn how Turnitin works to detect plagiarism in all undergraduate Flex courses. Read a firsthand account of what goes into revising a Flex course. Click on the cover image below to view the Flex Gazette.

In this Issue: Learn tips and tricks for using and navigating Google Gemini AI. Get the latest notes on Eastern's AI policy. Discover new tools and resources for faculty that make adopting textbooks and incorporating AI into your workflow easier. Unlock more insights about your Zoom meetings with the new Zoom AI Companion. Support students through the advising process with the all new CRM Advise platform.

September 24, 2025 Sue Yavor will guide you through the essentials of Brightspace and Grade Center, helping you set up, manage, and simplify your course grading. This session will give you the tools and confidence to move from Brightspace beginner to Grade Hero in no time.

October 29, 2025 Learn to build custom Gems & Agents and discover how you can use Google Apps Script to automate tasks across Forms, Docs, and Sheets by having Gemini write simple code scripts for you. No experience required! Led by Laura Thapa.