What is it?
It is good practice to prepare your documents to be accessible as you create them. This guide will not show you everything you can do but rather make you aware of what tools are available to help make your documents more accessible.
What does it do?
Blackboard Ally has a lot of useful features and you will find more information on this in the Adding Material to your Course section in the training organisation. Microsoft Office has its own accessibility checker which is worth looking at whilst preparing a document.
What should I know?
My Dundee
In Blackboard, we recommend using a document page as much as possible as opposed to uploading a document. A document page is essentially a web page within My Dundee. The document page offers automatic formatting and reminds you to provide alternative image descriptions etc. Remember to use things like titles, headers, and sub-headers instead of changing font thickness or size.
Microsoft Accessibility Checker
If you would like to upload documents to your module content, you can prepare your documents in other ways. For example, Microsoft Office offers an Accessibility Checker which provides helpful hints and tips on making your documents more accessible.
Downloading Formats
Step 1: To see the different file formats that students can see, go into the Student Preview Mode.
Step 2: For any item you’ve uploaded to your course, you will see an A icon. If you select this, you will see a list of formats that students will be able to download the file as, including ePub, electronic Braille, and MP3.
