Blackboard Ally

Blackboard Ally is a tool that is embedded within the Moodle to gauge the accessibility of your content. Being ADA compliant is extremely important when you have classes online and Ally helps with that. In addition to making your course accessible, Ally also creates alternative formats for your files. Alternative formats allows the students to decide which format best suites their needs. The main capabilities of Blackboard Ally are:

  • Alternative formats: Automatically generates alternative formats that are accessible for the students (i.e. audio, captioning, electronic braille)
  • Accessibility score: Reviews commonly used course material for accessibility and scores them
  • Instructor feedback: Supplies direction for instructors to improve accessibility for their course content
  • Course reports: Compiles the accessibility scores into a course report that is viewable by the Moodle administrator.

Why is Accessibility Important?

According to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990, educational institutions must provide equal opportunities for learning to all students, including students with disabilities.

In regard to online learning, any technology used and instructional materials provided in an online course must be accessible for all students, especially those with disabilities.

Accessibility Checklist

Accessible course content is necessary to make your course easier for everyone to read and access course material. There are many low-effort adjustments that can be made to start create more accessible content.

  • Use a font size of at least 12 pt.
  • Have sufficient contrast between text and background
  • Use proper heading styles
  • Use a logical heading structure
  • Add alternative descriptions to images that convey the full meaning of the image
  • Ensure that all tables have column headers
  • Use built-in list functionality for all lists
  • Ensure that all links have text that describes the target
  • Use built-in PowerPoint slide templates
  • Don't use scanned PDFs
  • Ensure that all PDFs are tagged

Supported File Types

Blackboard Ally will generate alternative formats to the files you have uploaded in your course. This can benefit all participants as it makes the document you created easier to read and function with. After you attach a file to your course Ally will scan it and create an alternative format that will better fit that file. As the instructor you don't have to do anything to generate an alternative file; just upload the file and Ally will do the hard work for you.

Ally will provide alternative format for the following file types:

  • Images
  • HTML
  • PDF
  • Word (DOCX)
  • PowerPoint (PPTX)

Ally does not support the following file types:

  • Scanned documents
  • Excel
  • Tagged PDF
  • Mobile-friendly HTML
  • Audio
  • ePub
  • Electronic Braille
  • Translated Version

Note: there is no file size limit for files to be scanned for alternative formats.

The icon below is the alternative format icon. This will bring up a window for you to choose which alternative format you want it converted to.

Uploaded Image (Thumbnail)

Uploaded Image (Thumbnail)

 

For more information on how to use Blackboard Ally you can visit our Faculty Documentation in Moodle: https://moodle.cobleskill.edu/course/view.php?id=15036&section=13

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