Introduction

In the fall semester of the 2020-2021 fiscal year, the Educational Technology Department initiated the release of the Ally accessibility tool to help bolster inclusive measures for students at Catawba Valley Community College.

What is Ally?

Ally is a web-based tool that automatically generates up to eight unique “Alternative Formats” of files in your courses and makes them readily available at a click. In addition to providing alternative formats, Ally also has the ability to assess the accessibility of the content created in and/or uploaded to your Blackboard courses. And to make the process even easier for faculty, Ally provides step-by-step instruction to address any issues that your document may have.

What are the Alternative Formats?

Accessibility Indicators

When you upload a supported file (Word, PowerPoint, PDF, etc.) Ally will check your document for any accessibility issues and provide you with an indicator of how accessible your document is. These indicators appear as gauges and are based on a 100% scale and are only seen in the instructor view. Students are not able to see any of the accessibility information unless you share your computer screen with them.

Caution!
While Ally does its best to ensure that as many accessibility issues as possible are caught and fixed, Ally is reliant on an algorithm programmed to look for a set amount of issues and only catches about 25-30% of all accessibility issues. Ally is, by no means, a catch all or a replacement for the services provided by Disability Services. For more information on the Accessibility services offered at CVCC, please visit http://cvcc.edu/About_Us/Accessibility.cfm.

Increasing Accessibility with Ally

Ally attempts to make the process of increasing the accessibility of a resource easier by providing not only suggestions, but by also highlighting the area of the document that contains an accessibility issue. When you click on a gauge, Ally will tell you the document’s score, as a percentage, and what you need to change in order to improve that score.

Additionally, Ally has explanations of the issue along with help pages to explain how to fix them. You can access the explanation of the issue by clicking the “What this means” button; clicking the “How to…” button will take you to a page with instructions on how to fix your issue.

For uploaded documents such as PDFs, Word documents, and PowerPoint slide decks, you will need to re-upload a fixed version of the file. You can do this by dragging and dropping the file to the drop zone in the Ally view. When you upload your fixed version, Ally will replace the lower-scoring document and re-evaluate for any remaining issues.

Helpful Tips
You will not want to re-upload the document after each fix as this will be unnecessarily time consuming. Instead, go through the document on your computer and fix all of the issues that Ally has identified and then submit your newly-revised document.

Ally Course Overview

You can see an overview of all of the documents Ally has assessed in your course by going to Course Tools > Accessibility Report under the Course Management section in the Blackboard sidebar.

Video

For further help with any of these directions, if you have any questions, or would like any assistance, please contact the HelpDesk by email at or at 828-327-7000 ext. 4444.

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