Student Resources
Students have a variety needs when accessing and viewing online course content. If you've ever wanted to read a course document in a different format for better readability or needed additional accessibility options, Panorama can help. It offers tools to enhance your learning experience and even allows you to upload your own documents to view alternative formats. Learn more about what Panorama can do for you below.
Panorama empowers students by providing alternative formats for viewing course content. These alternative formats allow documents and course materials to be converted and viewed in a variety of different ways. Please note that your instructor has the ability to disable alternative formats.
To use this feature, you must access your D2L course through a web browser such as Google Chrome, as it is not available in mobile applications.
Accessing Alternative Formats
To view the Alternative Formats menu for an item in your course, click the accessibility icon as shown below.
Alternative formats is unavailable if the icon is disabled.
Alternative Formats Menu
Below is the complete list of available Panorama Alternative Formats and their definitions.
Displays the document in PDF format, suitable for both online and download viewing
Displays the document in its original format, suitable for download viewing.
Displays the document in a pure text format without any formatting styles, suitable for both online and download viewing.
Enhances visual word recognition when reading by providing a guiding color gradient.
Audio playback for documents, suitable for both online and download listening.
Converts images with text into machine-encoded text that can be searched and read by screen readers.
- OCR Overlaid Tagged PDF: Generate a tagged PDF that allows for selectable text overlaid on the original scanned document or image.
- OCR Reconstructed DOCX: Generate a brand new DOCX file from scanned documents or images.
- OCR Reconstructed Tagged PDF: Generate a brand new tagged PDF from the scanned document or image.
- OCR Reconstructed HTML: Generate a brand new HTML file from scanned documents or images.
- OCR Text: Recommended for those who’d like plain text, the OCR tool will extract and display text within images and GIFs as a TXT file.
- OCR Audio: Extract text within images and GIFs into an MP3 text-to-speech audio player.
- OCR Semantic Text: Converts scanned text into readable, structured text while preserving context and layout.
- OCR Semantic Audio: Transforms scanned text into audio with natural intonation and emphasis, enhancing listening comprehension.
Translates a document automatically to over 100 languages, which can be downloaded.
Allows for customizations to text preferences, grammar options, and reading preferences while following along with the audio playback.
Displays the document in the ebook format, suitable for any ebook reader application
HTML documents can be displayed in a dedicated tab to customize the appearance of the document using the Website Accessibility tool.
Converts documents containing math equations into LaTeX, Math Text (i.e. numbers and symbols to words), or MP3 files.
- Latex: Convert documents into LaTeX document format.
- Math Text: Convert documents into printed English, including numbers and symbols.
- Math Audio: Convert documents to MP3.
- MathML: Extract mathematical equations from documents and convert them into HTML files.
Displays the document in the braille grade 2 format, suitable for download viewing (a braille reader is required).
The DocHub is a platform that allows you to upload files, and view alternative formats outside of course content.
To access DocHub, navigate to the Tools menu in your D2L course, then select Panorama. From there, you can upload and organize documents to easily view alternative formats of your files.
