[Athen] Blackboard Ally and Kaltura Reach

[Rovner, Amy]

We are using Ally here in WA state at all 34 Community and Technical colleges.  We are a Canvas system and Ally works really well!  It does generate those alternate formats (including OCR!)  for students and faculty.  It also provides visible feedback to faculty in the form of a small gauge that is colored red, yellow or green to flag their uploaded content.  When faculty click on the gauge, it opens an Ally page that highlights the most important improvement a faculty can make (as well as a link to all the flagged issues).  There are instructions and, for alt text, a box where the faculty can add the alt text right away.

The colored gauges are a bit of a shock to the faculty when they first open their course and see red gauges. However once reassured that students cannot see it, they relax a bit and start to engage to make their course more accessible.

We have been very happy with it.

You are welcome to contact me if you have further questions.

Best,
Amy


Amy Rovner, MPH RD
Instructional Designer
Accessible IT Coordinator
eLearning Services
Shoreline Community College
(206) 546-6937
arovner at shoreline.edu

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From: athen-list [mailto:athen-list-bounces at mailman13.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Russell Solowoniuk
Sent: Monday, April 16, 2018 10:00 AM
To: Access Technology Higher Education Network <athen-list at u.washington.edu>
Subject: [Athen] Blackboard Ally and Kaltura Reach

Hi everyone,

Last week I watched an online webinar on "Automating accessibility within the learning management system". CSU Chico did a pilot project and used Blackboard Ally and Kaltura Reach in the project.


>From what I understand, Blackboard Ally will take materials that instructors upload into the LMS and create several alternate formats of the materials (HTML, ePub, audio, electronic Braille), and make these formats available to students. It will also send an accessibility report to the instructor showing where accessibility issues within their original document were found. In addition to this, I think it also creates an institutional accessibility report.


CSU Chico also used Kaltura Reach to help caption videos. Again, from my understanding, Kaltura Reach will automatically caption videos that are uploaded into the LMS. Depending on the quality of the videos, the accuracy rate can be as high as 75% or higher.

Some of this sounds too good to be true, so I just thought I'd check with all of you to see if anyone is using either of these products, and, if so, how well are they working for your institution.

Thanks for any feedback.

Russell

Russell Solowoniuk
AT Educational Assistant, Services to Students with Disabilities
MacEwan University
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Edmonton, AB  T5J 4S2
E: solowoniukr at macewan.ca<mailto:solowoniukr at macewan.ca>
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