Ally is a third-party tool that is integrated in Canvas. Ally is a tool to aid making digital course content more accessible. It achieves this by providing automatic conversion options for students to allow them to download resources from Canvas in alternative formats. It also highlights to academics and administrators which resources can be improved in terms of accessibility and how.

View our glossary of terms to familiarise yourself with the various acronyms and terminology associated with Ally, accessibility and digital education in general.

Supporting Diverse Student Needs

Oxford is a diverse community. Every student has a unique combination of learning abilities, needs, and devices. Course content created with inclusion in mind can benefit not only students with disclosed disabilities such as visual impairments and dyslexia, but improve the learning experience for all our students. Ally’s Alternative Formats and Instructor Feedback help make your content more accessible for everyone.

This guide covers the following three key aspects of Ally and how they are presented and used within Canvas:

Alternative formats
Accessibility indicators
Course accessibility report

Each section contains brief guidance followed by a link to more in-depth help provided by Ally.

Alternative Formats

Ally automatically generates eight “Alternative Formats” of your course files and Canvas pages. You or your student may want to use alternative formats to get:

a version of a document more compatible with assistive technologies such as screen readers (for instance tagged or OCRed PDF)
a more readable version of the document (for instance Beeline reader)
an audio version of the document

To download a file in an alternative format click the “A” icon ( ) or anywhere you see “Alternative Formats”. This opens a pop up menu with all the available options (pictured below).

Screenshot showing the download alternative formats pop up

Based on the original file, you will see your list of available options. Choose the option you want and click “download”.

Important: Your original file will not be affected by the alternative formats.

What about copyright and prohibitions on making derivate works?

From the Ally FAQ page:

Alternative formats are only and always available with the original file.
Students must enroll in a course to get alternative formats. If a course is made public, Ally doesn't provide the alternative formats to anonymous users.
Ally doesn't provide alternative formats for documents with metadata stating no derivatives of a document can be generated. Ally will only scan the document for accessibility issues and include this data in the report and instructor feedback.

For more detailed information about the alternative formats see Ally's comprehensive PDF guide (page 7).

Accessibility Indicators

Ally gives you an Accessibility Indicator for each file or page in your Canvas course.

This indicator describes how will the file or page can be accessed by assistive technologies such as screen readers or screen magnifiers. It is based on the WCAG 2.1 standard. More accessible files will also make the alternative formats higher quality.

You can fix any of these issues by following the step-by-step guide built into Ally:

You will find the Accessibility Indicators (pictured below) next to files (Word Docs, PowerPoints, PDFs, images).
Select the indicator to view the Instructor Feedback. Follow along step-by-step to address the issues identified.

Screenshot showing the Blackboard Ally Accessibility Indicators on the Canvas modules view

The feedback on the accessibility of your course files is marked by the coloured dials with a gauge indicator that appear next to your file names (Red, Orange, Light Green, and Dark Green).

These accessibility indicators are only visible to you and other users with editing access on the Canvas course.

When you add a file to the course an indicator will appear next to the file name after a few minutes. Ally checks most file formats, but there may be some files in your course that don’t have an Ally indicator next to them.

Ideally, all the indicators will be green, but do not be alarmed if they are not.

To improve the accessibility of a file based on the accessibility indicators:

Hover over the coloured dial indicator and see the “accessibility score”.
When you select the indicator, Ally walks you through a series of steps to make the file more accessible. All you need to do is read the directions and respond to the prompts.
Information is provided on what the issue is, why it matters, and how to correct it appropriately.
In some cases you can make the fix directly in Canvas, such as adding an alternative description to an image file. In most cases, Ally links you to resources to help solve the problem in the original file (most often Word, PowerPoint or PDF).
Once you’ve made the necessary fixes in your authoring tool, upload the new file directly to Ally, and watch your score improve.

When you add a file to the course an indicator will appear next to the file name after a few minutes. Ally checks most file formats, but there may be some files in your course that don’t have an Ally indicator next to them.

See Ally's comprehensive PDF guide (page 9) for more information on how to interpret the accessibility indicators.

Course Accessibility Report

The Course Accessibility Report contains a summary score of how accessible the files and pages are on your course. Use the report to tackle accessibility issues file by file, prioritise specific issues based on severity, or focus on the issues that are easiest to fix first.

Screenshot highlighting the location of the Blackboard Ally link in the course navigation.

Find your “Accessibility Report” in the left navigation menu of your course on Canvas.

Screenshot showing the Blackboard Course Accessibility screen

The Course Accessibility Score in the top-left corner represents the average accessibility score across all your files and pages.

Each content item is checked against the WCAG 2.1 AA standard and scored based on the severity of issue or issues. These are the standards that are recognised in the UK and which the University has a commitment to work towards. You can view a breakdown of the types of content and files in your course in the overview tab. The “Remaining issues” section of the report allows you to order issues identified by order of severity. We recommend you focus on issues identified as “Severe” or “Major” as improving those will be most beneficial to students.

View Ally's comprehensive PDF guide (page 4) for more information on how to interpret and use the Course Accessibility Report.

This quick start guide to using Ally, is a derivative of "Canvas 2020 Adoption Toolkit" by Ally, used under CC BY. This guide is licensed under CC BY by the Centre for Teaching and Learning.