[Athen] Accessibility Checkers for Canvas

[Makoto Tsuchitani]

Hi Liz,

We did some early investigation of Ally this past Spring. In addition to providing metrics/reports, Ally also supports document conversion to alt formats. We had our Accommodations Coordinator review the converted “output” that Ally produced to help us determine whether it would be appropriate to pilot Ally at that time. She found that Ally’s converted documents were less usable than the alt format documents produced by other stand alone tools. That being said, Ally was very responsive with regards to seeking input to fine tune their conversion algorithms. So the experience with the current version of Ally may differ from what we experienced 6 months ago.

Regards,

Thanks,
Makoto

Makoto Tsuchitani
Director of Platforms
Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning
Stanford University
408 Panama Mall, Room 023
Stanford, CA 94305-2260
ph: 650.799.1561
fx: 650.725-4685


From: athen-list <athen-list-bounces at mailman13.u.washington.edu> on behalf of "Prickett, Elizabeth" <Elizabeth.Prickett at victoriacollege.edu>
Reply-To: Access Technology Higher Education Network <athen-list at u.washington.edu>
Date: Tuesday, October 18, 2016 at 3:08 PM
To: "'altmedia at htclistserv.htctu.fhda.edu'" <altmedia at htclistserv.htctu.fhda.edu>, "'athen-list at u.washington.edu'" <athen-list at u.washington.edu>
Subject: [Athen] Accessibility Checkers for Canvas

Good evening!

We are in the middle of transitioning to Canvas from Blackboard. We would like to utilize an accessibility checking tool as we review our online courses. I’ve talked with the folks who created UDOIT<https://online.ucf.edu/teach-online/resources/udoit/> at InstructureCon and they offer a lot of guidance on their pages. I know that someone on one of the listservs recently posted and inquiry about Ally – Making course content accessible<http://ally.ac/>, too, which seems like it may offer something similar.

Has anyone tried Ally yet? Has anyone run a comparison of the two? I could be wrong, but UDOIT seems like a tool that would be more useful for instructors and guiding them to make courses more accessible, and the Ally tool may be better at running reports for admins. However, I’m not really sure since they (Ally) have such little info online. And, I’m definitely not sure how accurate an algorithm generated alt format is! Also, as far as I know, UDOIT is free, and I don’t know if the other tool is free or not.

Thanks for any insight! Have an excellent week,

Liz Prickett
Alternative Media Specialist
Center for Academic & Professional Excellence (CAPE) Victoria College
2200 E. Red River Street
Victoria, TX 77901
(361) 573-3291 x3243
Elizabeth.Prickett at VictoriaCollege.edu<mailto:Elizabeth.Prickett at VictoriaCollege.edu>

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