Ally: Faculty Quick Start

• Your class is full of diverse students with unique learning abilities. Providing them with more accessible original content means they can choose formats that work best for them: HTML for improved reading on mobile phones, Electronic Braille for the visually impaired, and Audio for learning on the go.
• Ally automatically scans your original content, and performs a series of steps to make them more accessible.
• Ally offers two features described below- Alternative Formats and Course Content Accessibility Checker which are both automatically enabled in your Canvas course site.

Alternative Formats

• Ally automatically generates these “Alternative Formats” for all your course files, and makes them available for download to you and your students.
• Your original file will not be affected by the alternative formats.
• There are no additional actions required to make your files available in alternative formats.  Simply add them to your course(s) as you always have in Canvas and Ally by Blackboard will take care of the rest.
• The translated version is an opt-in format.
• Note: Image files (jpg, png, gif) do not allow for alternative formats.
• For more information, The Ally File Transformer knowledge-base article.

Please note: Faculty do not need to enable anything in their Canvas course site to make this functionality available.  It is already enabled and available to students.

Course Content Accessibility Checker

• After a successful pilot, St. Thomas implemented the Ally Course Content Accessibility Checker for all Canvas courses in Summer 2021.
• This Ally tool integrates directly with Canvas and automatically checks the content used in a course (including files) for common accessibility issues.
• Ally provides an accessibility score for each content item and provides guidance on how to raise these scores.
• Faculty can prioritize and correct issues in items with lower accessibility scores.
• Through Ally you will learn more about accessibility issues, why they matter and how to fix them.
• For more information, The Ally Accessibility Checker knowledge-base article.