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The Blackboard Manual


Blackboard TEL Guides

The Blackboard Manual

Blackboard Ally

Blackboard Ally is a site-wide tool that provides staff with an easy way to check that all course content is accessible to students. This enables you to better comply with accessibility laws.Opens in new window

This tool automatically processes any Word, PowerPoint and PDF documents as well as content added to any Blackboard web page, and provides an accessibility score that only staff can see. Blackboard Ally will check your content for issues with:

  • Images that are missing a description
  • Insufficient colour contrast (where colours are too light or dark to clearly see)
  • Incorrect use of headings
  • Tables that are missing headers
  • Scanned PDF files (which cannot be read by screen readers)

Ally does not check ZIP archives, Excel files or Apple Pages or Keynote files. You will still also need to manually check your content for font choice and size, site layout and add captions to videos that you upload for use in your courses. These basic checks are detailed in the Accessibility page of this manual.

Watch the Overview
Ally Overview
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Accessibility Indicators

These are presented as one of four icons which are placed next to the content. You can click on these icons to view a detailed breakdown of the accessibility score of that content as a percentage. This percentage is then broken down further to highlight all detected accessibility problems, with guidance on how to fix each issue.

Red guage icon

The Red, low score icon indicates that this piece of content has poor accessibility. Common reasons include the lack of alternative text for images, missing headings or incorrect page structure. Users who rely on screen reading technology will find this very difficult to access.

Orange / amber guage icon

The Orange, medium score indicates that the content is partially accessible. Again, click on the icon to see the detailed breakdown of the score for that individual file, and view information on how to make this content more accessible.

Light green guage icon

The light green, high score means that the content has good accessibility. However, you can still use the guidance from Ally to improve this score further.

Dark green guage icon

The dark green perfect score means that Ally could not find any accessibility issues with the file. However, you should also make your own checks for issues that the system does not pick up - such as:

  • Simple page structure (don't rely on using files and folders), but consider using Items or Learning Modules
  • Simple language to aid quicker understanding
  • Breaking up large blocks of text to make reading easier
  • Utilising images / graphics to support your text
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Course Reports

Ally provides an easy way to find out how accessible your course is as a whole via the course report. This is a high level interactive report that generates statistics to inform you how accessible the site is, and enables you to drill down into individual issues so that you can fix and update content in line with the principles of universal design for learning (designing content suitable for everyone).

To see the report for you site, within the Course Management Control Panel, open the Course Tools menu and choose Accessibility Report

Accessibility Report is the first menu option under Course Tools

The overall report will then open up for you to view.

The overview has a pie chart of content types, and other sections contain lists of content to fix

You will be able to see at a glance what types of content your course contains, as well as options on improving accessibility from this page. The detailed list of issues can be found underneath these charts, so you can also begin investigating the remaining issues that are currently outstanding.

If you have a lot of content that needs to be updated, you can begin by clicking the Start button to either address issues by the easiest to fix, or by the most severe. This will allow you to prioritise how to quickly fix the most pressing issues that affect the most users.

The Black tick icon denotes easiest fixes
The red gauge icon denotes content with the lowest scores

Click on the coloured gauge icon next to the file to see how to fix the issues that have been picked up.

Change a setting

Fixing Issues

Once you have clicked on one of the coloured gauge indicators, the analysis for that content will appear. You can click on the What this means button to get a simple explanation of what the problem is, and why it should be fixed. The button beneath this will tell you how you can fix the problem. Some content can be fixed immediately (such as providing alternative text to images in a Blackboard page), but some content (such as Word documents) must be updated offline, and then re-uploaded using the drag and drop area or using the Browse button to replace the old non-compliant version. The accessibility score will then be recalculated.

An example reoprt on a document showing highlighted problems on the left, and information on fixes in the right pane of the page

Locating each problem

By default, the first problem is highlighted, but if you want to see the full list of all of the identified problems at once, you can click on the All issues button.

Click the All Issues button

This will group each issue into its own category

See each category, and the fix to raise the accessibility score

Click on one of the Fix buttons to find out what the problem is, and how you can fix it. Navigate through the rest of the pages using the controls at the top of the page:

Navigate through each page of a document by clicking on the left and right arrows

Navigate through each type of problem by clicking on the up and down arrows

Hide all highlighted problems in the current content

Zoom in and out of the page using the plus and minus buttons

Download a copy of the original document

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Alternative Versions

Once processed, students are able to download different versions of the original file automatically on request. Documents can be downloaded as an audio file for offline listening, in ePub format for reading as an eBook, as BeeLine Reader Opens in new windowcolour highlighted text, or as Braille. The system, can also attempt to convert scanned PDF documents to a text version for better compatibility with assistive technology.

To access an alternative format, any user can click on the Ally icon next to the content and choose from one of the available formats. Once selected, click the Download button to get the file in the format you have chosen.

List of formats to download

* Although Ally can attempt to process scanned PDF documents to try to make them more accessible, it is strongly recommended that you use alternatives to these wherever possible, as a document presented in a Microsoft Word format - or added as text inside a Blackboard Item will always be more accurate.