[Athen] Ally for Blackboard

[Christopher Phillips]

We have implemented Ally at Utah State with Canvas, but I understand that the user experience for Blackboard and Canvas are very similar.

There are two significant pieces to Ally – the reporting side and the faculty feedback/remediation side. We have had the reporting tool installed since last year and have found that simple awareness (and identification) of courses and file types that have the kinds of accessibility issues that can be identified through automatic checking. The reporting tools are very useful and provide the opportunity filter down to a course or to look at all courses with a specific issue.

For the instructor feedback and remediation piece we have only turned it on for a limited set of faculty. We are finding that the remediation and workflow they provide to assist faculty in making more accessible documents are helpful, but there is currently very little ability to customize that experience to limit what types of feedback we provide or direct faculty to institutional resources. Their workflow for adding alt text to images for example is great and we would love to turn on that functionality for faculty, but we are not yet ready to start asking faculty to tag a PDF document.

That said, the Ally team has been very receptive to feedback and are releasing new features on a regular basis. For anyone interested there is a community group that has lots of great info and feedback from other users:
https://usergroup.ally.ac/

--
Christopher Phillips
Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility Coordinator
Center for Innovative Design and Instruction
Utah State University
435-797-5535

From: athen-list <athen-list-bounces at mailman13.u.washington.edu> on behalf of "Norwich, Lorraine S" <lnorwich at bu.edu>
Reply-To: Access Technology Higher Education Network <athen-list at u.washington.edu>
Date: Saturday, June 10, 2017 at 6:33 PM
To: Access Technology Higher Education Network <athen-list at u.washington.edu>
Subject: [Athen] Ally for Blackboard


HI



Does anyone have information that they have on the software.  How well does it work and is it cost effective to buy



Thanks



Lorraine




Lorraine S. Norwich, BSME, MSIS

Assistant Director of Disability Services Boston University

19 Deerfield Street, 2nd Floor Boston, MA 02215

lnorwich at bu.edu (email)

617-353-3658 (vox)

617-353-9646 (fax)

www.bu.edu/disability (website)
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