Ally for Canvas
Introducing Blackboard Ally
What Students Will See
Students will see a small button to the right of each document in Canvas when they hover the mouse over the document name. For keyboard users, the button will appear when the keyboard focus moves to the button when tabbing past the document name.</p
Activating this button will produce a list of Accessible Versions of the source document as shown in the example below.
The accessible versions available will depend on the original document. The student may select the format that best meets their needs and select the Download button to obtain a copy of the original document in the selected format.
What Instructors Will See
The goal of Ally is to assist instructors with learning techniques for enhancing the accessibility of course documents. There are no REQUIRED actions. However, it is intended that the Ally tutorials will provide enough information to improve the accessibility of current documents and apply these same techniques when creating future documents so they are accessible from the start.
After a document is uploaded into Canvas, an automated accessibility evaluation is performed and a small accessibility indicator will appear next to the document name indicating the overall accessibility of the document. This process can take a few minutes to several hours depending on the traffic on the Ally server.
The indicator is color-coded and uses a visual pointer to indicate the accessibility score.
- Red indicator with a left-pointing arrow = low accessibility score
- Orange indicator with an upward-pointing arrow = medium accessibility score
- Green indicator with a right-pointing arrow = high accessibility score
Clicking on or selecting the accessibility indicator, will pop-up a series of steps designed to lead instructors through the process of retrofitting the document to improve the accessibility.
Once the steps are complete, the final version can be uploaded to Canvas to replace the original document giving students a more usable and more accessible document. The new, revised document would then display a green indicator representing a high accessibility score.
Ally does not discard the original version of the document. It is retained within the Ally system and can be retrieved if necessary.
For More Information:
Contact the AccessMU Center at 513-529-0200 or AccessMU@MiamiOH.edu
Ally Accessibility Checklist [PDF]: A quick-start reference to creating more accessible course content.
