Ally

What is Ally?

Ally is a digital accessibility tool that seamlessly integrates with the Moodle Learning Management System (LMS), focusing on making digital course content more accessible to students. Ally alerts instructors when their course files are not accessible, describes why files are problematic, and provides solutions to those accessibility errors. Also, Ally provides alternative file formats that are available to all students, including tagged PDF, HTML, ePub, Electronic Braille, and Audio. Alternative file formats provide options for a range of students from different backgrounds. For more information on Ally, please see the Ally instructor package for Bb Open LMS & Moodle. 

Below is a list of resources provided by Ally for both faculty and students. Within each of these resources, you will find useful information on how to use Ally and make your courses more accessible for your students, and how students can better utiliize the platform.

• Ally Resource Guide for Instructors
• Ally Resource Guide for Students
• Ally for Learning Mangement Systems

What do the Scores Mean?

Ally provides you detailed feedback and support to help you become an accessibility pro. Learn about accessibility issues, why they matter, and how to fix them. Green is the goal! After you upload files in your course, Ally produces an accessibility score for each file. In lessons with multiple files, the accessibility score is shown for each file. In areas where you access files, the accessibility icon is located to the right or left of the file.

Select the Accessibility score to open the instructor feedback.

  Low (0-33%): Needs help! There are severe accessibility issues.
  Medium (34-66%): A little better. The file is somewhat accessible and needs improvement.
  High (67-99%): Almost there. The file is accessible but more improvements are possible.
 Perfect (100%): Perfect! Ally didn't identify any accessibility issues.

Accessibility Checker

We are excited to announce that the instructor feedback utility will now show in-browser previews for PDFS, Word and PowerPoint documents. Previews are used to identify where specific accessibility concerns are located. Highlights are currently provided for: images without an appropriate alternative description, text fragments with insufficient contrast, and tables without table headings. This should make it significantly easier to identify issues in a document, and should help to dramatically cut-down remediation time. Instructor feedback previews are available for all 2019 courses starting today. Please let us know if you have any questions by reaching out to our Ally administrator.

 Would you like to know more about Live Preview? Watch this instructional video.