Accessibility Basics
Accessibility is all about universal design and making the best choices for all your learners. When content is easily accessible then all learners can benefit from finding and processing information more easily.
There are a few main and simple changes you can make which can have a good impact on the accessibility of your content:
- Include headers for illustrative tables / pictures
- Create consistent headings which are clear in MS Word
- Provide alternative text for images
- Use MS Office’s accessibility checker, which will scan your documents accessibility but also guides you on how to make it better.
1. Blackboard Ally
Blackboard Ally is a tool that allows students to download documents and things in a range of formats. It provides a set of tools to help advise instructors on some of the basic accessibility, deliver alternative formats for files downloaded to My Dundee, and it will provide reports and statistics.
1.1 Downloading formats
To see the different file formats that students can see, go into the Student Preview Mode. For any item you’ve uploaded to your course, you’ll see an icon that looks like an A. If you click on that, you’ll see a list of formats that students will be able to download the file as, including ePub, electronic Braille, and MP3.
1.2 Accessibility scores
Instructors (and only instructors) can see accessibility scores for the uploaded items in the course, and receive advice on how to create more accessible documents. There will be a small icon next to each item that you an click on to see the percentage that Ally has given for the item. When you click on this, you’ll see anything that needs to be fixed in the item as well as information on how to fix it.
1.3 Course Reports
Course reports take the individual bits of data associated to give you overall statistics for your module. To access this, go into Content & Tools in the left-hand menu and click on Accessibility Report. In the report you will see a range of information and statistics, and you can also use this information to go through your content to fix any remaining issues.
2. Yuja
Yuja is our primary video platform for delivering, recording, editing and organising our video collections for our teaching. YuJa auto-captions any videos uploaded to the platform. Notice in Yuja not only do you get automatic captioning but students can use the transcription available to them navigate what’s going on.