What’s up with the dials?

Instructors: Wondering what that color-coded dial next to your content means?

This dial is part of a tool called Blackboard Ally, which you can use to enhance the accessibility of your course content. Students cannot see the dials – they are for YOU so you can make informed decisions about how to improve the materials you’re providing to students.

Ally integrates with Brightspace and offers three primary benefits:

• Allows students to download content in a variety of alternative formats
• Coaches instructors on how to improve the accessibility of their content
• Collects institutional data to assist with identifying accessibility priorities

Watch this video for an overview of these benefits:

Ally and accessibility

Ally is active in your course as part of campus-wide efforts to enhance accessibility in all Wentworth learning environments. Accessibility “provides students the opportunity to acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as students without disabilities, with substantially equivalent ease of use” (UDL on Campus).  Fully accessible content is content that ALL your students can access, so they can contribute meaningfully to your course and our community regardless of disability status.

Accessible practices closely align with universal design for learning (UDL) practices, particularly when it comes to creating multiple means of representation for students to interact with the content. When a student can choose to read, listen, or annotate text based on their needs and preferences, that satisfies a criterion of UDL, enhances the accessibility of the course experience, and fuels equity in learning by allowing students to access content in ways that are most beneficial to them.

Tips to getting started with Ally

• Inform your students they can now download content in a variety of formats using the alternative formats icon.
• Start reviewing your dials. “Red” scores indicate materials with significant barriers to access, requiring important fixes. “Yellow” or “green” scores indicate materials that could benefit from additional attention, but are somewhat accessible to students as-is.
• Use the Ally Course Report to help you check and adjust content. The course report organizes issues by ease of fix and significance of fix, and it also offers guidance on what to do to improve your scores.

We recommend prioritizing improvements that will have the biggest impact on the course experience. Three common accessibility issues our team has noticed are scanned PDFs and images in need of alt text. Stay tuned for more guidance on how to correct these issues; the fixes are easier than you think, and they will have a huge impact on the success of your students!

On getting to green

While considering how to improve your course, remember that a score of 100% is a bit of a misnomer. There is no such thing as “Perfect!” accessibility, because new needs will emerge and new technologies will appear. Your goal is progress, not perfection, when it comes to accessible content and practices.

It can be overwhelming to start thinking about accessibility, but like any journey, it begins with a single step. What is one improvement you can make to your course content today for the sake of your students?