Accessibility: Make your Freehand Grader assignment PDF accessible and other notes
Before you upload your assignment or solution set PDF in the Freehand Grader, make sure your PDF content is accessible.
- Students may have visual, auditory, mobility, or other needs that require assignments to be accessible in multiple ways. Most of these students can use assistive technology to download, edit, and upload their Freehand Grader assignment files.
- Speak with your students to find out what kinds of accommodations they use or may need to help them do their work. For example, some students rely on screen readers, screen magnifiers, and keyboard entry to work online.
How to make your Freehand Grader assignment PDF accessible
Look online for resources about how to create accessible PDF content. Below are some tips to get you started.
- Contact your school’s Accessibility Office or Disability Services —
When available, this department may have services that can help support you as well as to provide individual support for students. - Descriptions to make images accessible —
For students with vision impairment, check whether images have appropriate “alt text” image descriptions. These descriptions can be read aloud by screen readers.
Options if a Freehand Grader assignment is inaccessible to a student
Consider the following options if a student is unable to work with or submit answers in a Freehand Grader assignment.
If students have difficulty pinning their answer locations on the screen
Tell them to skip to document review instead of pinning.
- Student experience
After they upload their completed assignment PDF, these students should select Skip to document review, Continue, Submit, and then confirm their submission. (Other students should select Start pinning instead of “Skip to document review”.) - Instructor grading experience
Instructors never see student answer pins as they grade. The Freehand Grader uses them to help you navigate answers. For students who add pins, when instructors select “Next question” you jump to the location of the next answer. For students who don’t pin, instructors must scroll to find the next answer.
- Have the student contact the school’s resource center, if one is available.
- Exempt the student from the assignment
- Provide the student with alternate, comparable work
Grading implications
You grade Freehand Grader assignments from the Freehand Grader tool, not in MyLab or Mastering.
- To exempt a student from a Freehand Grader assignment — To make a Freehand Grader assignment unavailable to students, you can unassign it in MyLab and Mastering Platform Update courses, or change its dates in Mastering.
- No score adjustments outside of the Freehand Grader —
You cannot adjust a student’s Freehand Grader assignment score outside of the tool. Nor can you add a Freehand Grader score in your course Gradebook. - Grading notes for students —
It may be easier for students with disabilities to receive answer-specific feedback or notes separately, for example by email.
Updated 05 Feb 2026