Thing 22

Blackboard Ally

Accessible Content is Better Content. Blackboard Ally is an award-winning accessibility tool adopted by over 500 institutions and integrates seamlessly into the Charles Darwin University’s learning management system (LMS). Ally helps instructors create learning content that any student can access regardless of disability. Ally’s smart algorithms let instructors know if any of their materials are not accessibility friendly and provides helpful step by step advice to improve course content, making learning accessible for all.

An interesting exercise is to check the accessibility of one of your published word documents. You might find the accessibility rating of your document surprising. There are many things we can do to make our documents universally accessible. Blackboard Ally quickly rates the accessibility of your course content and provides instructions on ways to improve it.

There are many low effort adjustments that you can make to your content that will improve Access for all students:

• Use a font size of at least 12px.
• Have sufficient contrast between text and background.
• Use a tool like the Colour Contrast Analyser from The Paciello Group to check the contrast of your text.
• Use proper heading styles.
• Use a logical heading structure.
• Add alternative descriptions to images that convey the full meaning of the image.
• Use tables for tabular data only.
• 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.

Check out this helpful user guide: Link to Ally Guide

Alternate Formats benefit everyone, Blackboard Ally allows instructors and students to download course content in multiple alternate formats.

Universal Design

Universal Design for Learning guides the design of instructional goals, assessments, methods and materials to be customised and adjusted to meet individual needs. Within our digital space this can be to ensure that we have alternate formats of our unit outlines- such as captions on videos and creating assessments where reasonable adjustments can easily be made. An example of Universal Design in practice might be allowing a student to meet their learning outcomes in more than one way. It is not accessible to have a course full of online quizzes or to have a heavily weighted exam. We need to adapt to the larger cohort and ensure that we are meeting the needs of our students to increase retention.

We worked with a student who had recently broken their arm, the student was taking a music unit. Instead of requiring the student to play the piano, the teacher allowed the student to either submit a viva voce or a photographic journal explaining the steps involved in their learning experience. This kind of situation comes up time and time again however, students are forced to withdraw from a unit because the assessable items were not altered in any way. As an educational institution, we need to be flexible and provide our students with the access to successfully partake in their course regardless of disability. We can work with the available technology to get where we need to be.