Ally for Faculty
To support our commitment to a more inclusive campus, we’re introducing a new tool called Ally into your Blackboard courses to help improve the accessibility of your course content. Ally doesn’t change how anything works in your course, and won’t affect your course files.
You’ll notice in your course red, orange, light green, and dark green gauges next to your course files. These are “Ally Indicators” and they let you know the accessibility of the file. The indicators are only visible to instructors in the course. Simply click the indicator to read detailed feedback about what the accessibility issues are with the file, why they matter, and how to fix them. Learn more about Instructor Feedback.
Improving the accessibility of your course content will not only help ensure students with disabilities can access your materials, it will also improve the learning experience for students who use mobile devices as well as who want to engage with the material in a different way. Ally automatically generates “alternative formats” of your course files, and makes them available to you and your students by clicking the dropdown icon next to the file name. The alternative formats don’t affect your original file, and allow students to access an HTML version for their phone, an ePub version for their tablet, an MP3 version for audio, and electronic braille for braille readers. Learn more about Alternative Formats.
We hope you will take some first steps in using Ally to improve the accessibility of your course content, as well as encourage students to take advantage of the alternative formats. If you have questions or need help fixing an accessibility issue with one of your files, you can contact us at 256-7972.
Ally Overview Documents
Become familiar with Ally's key features and how to get started
Download an Alternative Format
Ally Micro-Learning
Learn about Ally one fix at a time. Walk through accessibility scenarios, and see how Ally feedback helps you improve inclusive learning in your course.
Add Alternative Descriptions to Image Files
Remove Potentially Harmful Content
Scanned PDFs: An Enemy to Accessibility
View All File Accessibility Issues
Add Alt Description to PowerPoint Images
Add Headings to a Word Document