ITSpotlight is designed to keep the campus up to date on ITS activities and services.
What is Blackboard Ally and How Does it Make Your Course Inclusive?
Posted August 10, 2022
By IDLT
What is Blackboard Ally and How Does it Make Your Course Inclusive?
Maybe you’ve noticed when you upload content to Blackboard, such as a Word document, PowerPoint presentation, or a PDF, that you see red, orange, or green icons appear next to them. This tool is called Blackboard Ally, and it is there to help make your content more accessible which makes your course more inclusive. Students can use the Ally tool to download alternative formats such as electronic braille, audio, ePub, HTML, among others. These formats meet the needs of students and their preferred method of learning.
To get started, you can click the accessibility indicator icon next to the file, or you can run the Course Accessibility Report that shows accessibility scores across all files in the course. Most prefer to start with the report as it tells you which files are the easiest to fix. Whether you start with an individual file or the report, the Blackboard Ally tool will take you through a wizard to assist you in deciding how best to improve accessibility of the file. Follow these instructions to interpret the score. PDF files are usually the trickiest to modify. Contact ITS (Information Technology Services) at help@siue.edu or 618-650-5500 if you would like assistance with interpreting Blackboard Ally accessibility scores.
In upcoming articles of the ITSpotlight, we will take a deeper dive into running the Course Accessibility Report and interpreting the accessibility scores.
