Improve Course Accessiblity with Ally
Ally is a powerful tool used for determining the level of accessibility regarding course content, and creates alternative formats of course content automatically. Once enabled in your course, Ally:
- Generates alternative formats for students to download: These can include audio or electronic braille versions of existing course content.
- Provide accessibility scores to instructors to review: Ally also measures each file attached to the course and assigns them a score depending on how accessible the file is. Once you have located the accessibility score for a piece of content, you can begin to explore accessibility issues and improve the content to raise the score.
- Provide instructor feedback on how to improve your accessibility score: Each file that requires improvements is provided a guide which allows course instructors and teaching assistants to make any changes necessary to improve that file.
Using Blackboard Ally in your Course
Considerations
- Ally is just one tool to use to assess and improve content accessiblity. To make improvements to files outside of Blackboard, Blackboard provides step-by-step guides to resolve course content issues.
- For PDFs, leverage Adobe Creative Cloud (Adobe Acrobat) to automatically update or assess accessibility issues. View a brief walkthrough.
- It is often easier to share the original file (e.g. Word, PowerPoint), which is usually more accessible than the PDF version.
- Many Microsoft 365 applications have an accessiblity checker within tools like Excel, PowerPoint, or Word.
