Accessibility Checking

The University is legally required to meet accessibility standards on its websites, intranets and mobile apps. Most of the standards are good practice, easily achieved and create an improved experience for everyone.

When you are creating materials for your course, you should ensure these are accessible and inclusive. The earlier you consider accessibility and inclusion, the easier this will be. If you are creating materials outside of Ultra, you can often check and improve their accessibility before you upload them, e.g. MS Office tools have built-in accessibility checkers. Different materials have different accessibility considerations.

When you finish an item or section of your course, you can check it for accessibility issues. You can easily find some of them automatically using Ally.

Ally is a tool integrated with Blackboard that can help you improve your course’s accessibility in a few ways:

  1. Score gauges to the top of Ultra Documents when you are editing a block and to the right of specific items within your course, usually files, indicate how accessible these are. Clicking on a gauge will show you details on how to improve the score for each piece of content.
  2. The Accessibility Report can show you an overview of your course’s accessibility and the issues that need to be fixed.
  3. Provides alternative formats for some elements of your course. Learn more about the alternative formats.

Screenshot of the accessibility score in Ally

 

 

 

 

 

Accessibility Report

To access the Accessibility Report, in your course main page click View course and Institution tools under Course Tools and select Accessibility Report.

This will bring up an overview of the types of files included in your course, a list of the issues and other information.

You can start fixing the easiest ones first, or the low scoring (most severe) first, or fix them by issue type.

It’s worth doing this section by section, as that way you can learn how to avoid issues or address them quicker as you go. If you wait until you have completed the course before checking for accessibility, the number of issues at that point may feel daunting and you may find that some of them could have been more easily addressed during course building rather than afterwards.

The accessibility report won’t find every issue in your course, but only some that can be found automatically. Others, like whether the language is simple and inclusive, or the headings meaningful are things you will need to look for yourself. Accessible design and Digital Accessibility and Inclusion guidance may help with this.

 

Screenshot of the course tools link in the menu.