Ally for Staff
This article explains what Ally Alternative Formats in Canvas are, and how you can use course reports to help improve your content accessibility as a teacher on a Canvas course.
Ally helps to gauge the accessibility of your Canvas content. It provides guidance and tips for lasting improvements to your content accessibility through course reports.
In addition to providing you with insight into your content accessibility, Ally automatically creates alternative versions of your files. This allows students to choose the type of file they want that best suits their needs.
While you're in the process of improving files, students can still access alternative copies.
Instructor Feedback
How to use Ally Course Accessibility Report Feature
Ally's Course Accessibility Reports can help Teachers on a Canvas course to get a big-picture view of how accessible your course content is. Then, you can drill down into the specifics to see exactly what types of content are getting good accessibility scores and what is scoring poorly and may need more attention. Ally can show you which files need remediation, give you some options for where to start, and guide you through the process of making those files more accessible.
Learn about Ally Course Accessibility Reports for Canvas Teachers
How to access your Ally Course Accessibility Reports
Ally's Course Accessibility Report feature is not automatically enabled in courses, so before you access it for the first time you will need to click into your Canvas course and manually enable this item on your course's navigation menu. You will need to do this in every course where you wish to view your Ally Course Accessibility Report.
4. Ally will now be enabled in your course.
Once you have enabled Ally Course Accessibility Reports in your courses, you will be able to access them by following these steps:
- Log into your Canvas site
- Click into the course whose report you want to view
- Select Ally Course Accessibility Report on the course navigation menu.
Click into the course whose report you want to view.
Your course report keeps your accessibility score visible at all times, and is divided into two tabs: Overview and Content. When initially clicking into the Course Report, it will always default to theOverview tab.
Accessibility Score
The accessibility score displays in the upper left of the page and shows your course's overall accessibility rating. Scores range from "Low" to "Perfect":
- Low (0-33%): This score means that your course needs help as Ally has flagged severe accessibility issues or that no course content has been identified yet.
- Medium (34-66%): This score means that your course is somewhat accessible, but Ally has flagged some accessibility issues that need improving.
- High (67-99%): This score means that your course is almost fully accessible - most things are accessible but a few more improvements are possible.
- Perfect (100%): Congratulations! This means that while there may be further improvements possible, Ally has not found any accessibility issues in your course.
Please note: The screenshots below do not contain real data and are provided for illustrative purposes only.
Overview tab
The Overview tab contains a dashboard to visually display all the types of content that you have in your course, content items that will be the easiest and fastest to fix, and items that received the lowest accessibility scores.
Below on the page is the list of remaining accessibility issues in your course. If this looks like a long list, don't worry; Ally will help you to decide where to start so that making improvements will be less overwhelming.
Ally checks the following content in your course:
- Files uploaded into your Canvas course:
- PDF. See Ally's PDF checklist for more information about specific criteria that Ally looks for.
- Office file types. See Ally's Office document checklist for more information about specific criteria that Ally looks for.
- Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx)
- Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt, .pptx)
- OpenOffice/LibreOffice files
- Uploaded HTML files
- Image files (.jpg, .jpeg, .gif, .png, .bpm, .tiff). See Ally's Image checklist for more information about specific image criteria that Ally looks for.
- YouTube videos embedded in course pages. See Ally's YouTube FAQ for more information about specific criteria Ally is looking for in YouTube videos.
- Content created within Canvas via the Rich Content Editor:
- Announcements
- Assignments
- Discussion Topics
- Canvas Quiz descriptions
- Syllabus pages
- Course Content pages
Clicking the black View button will take you to the Content tab, which displays a list of all your course content.
Quick and Easy fixes
Ally checks images in Canvas for alternative text descriptions. Alternative text describes the content of images, graphs, and charts for those who might not be able to see the image.
This may seem like an easy fix, and that's because it is! But being an easy fix doesn't make it any less important! Any student using assistive reading technology, such as a screen reader, relies on accurate and informative image descriptions to relay what a picture is showing. When writing an image description, it is imperative to not simply insert an image title. An image description should provide a textual alternative to the image so that people with a visual impairment can get an equivalent experience. Descriptions also make it easier for all students to connect the image with the context.
1. Click on the small red accessibility gauge in the lower left corner of an image.
2. A new window will appear. Type an image description in the text box.
If your image is only for visual effects and doesn't contain information relevant to the learning content, select Indicate image is decorative. Alternative texts/image descriptions aren't necessary for decorative images.
3. Click Add.
4. Your accessibility score should improve.
We may associate increased text size in a document as headings, when in reality a heading is something that should be created using a programs (Word, PPT, etc.) styling resources to create.
To add headings to a document:
- Download your document and open it.
- Select the text you want to make a heading.
- Select Home (in any MS Office product) and then choose the heading you want from the Styles group.
- Save the document with correctly created headings.
- Upload that new file to your course.
If the document with missing headings is a PowerPoint presentation, the process can be slightly more complex, but the easy-to-follow directions provided by Ally can help you along the way.
More often than not, documents are simply titled the same thing as the file name. The problem with that practice is that the file name is usually not very descriptive and can even have no meaning to anyone except the author. This visibility makes it easier to distinguish multiple documents before diving in. Title visibility allows for easier navigation for all students. To add a title you'll need access to the original document. If the document is a Microsoft document you simply:
- Click File.
- Under the Properties section on the right-hand side, enter the title in the empty text box
- Save the file.
- Upload the saved file to Canvas
Learn more about how to fix issues identified in your course report on https://help.blackboard.com/Ally/Ally_for_LMS/Administrator/Improve_Accessibility