The Office of Instructional Technology team can assist faculty and teaching assistants on using Ally on Canvas.
EMAIL: oit@law.gwu.edu
The Instructional Technology Lab team is available to assist faculty and teaching assistants with making course content accessible through one-on-one consultations and workshops.
PHONE: (202) 994-0485
EMAIL: itl@gwu.edu
LOCATION: Gelman Library, lower level
Ally reviews the files uploaded to a Canvas course, scores how well the content meets accessibility requirements, and then provides guidance and tips on improving accessibility. Ally also creates alternative formats of your course files allowing students to download the file type that best suits their needs.
Ally’s accessibility checklist is based on WCAG 2.1 AA (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), an international accessibility standard.
In many cases, improving the accessibility of course content benefits all students, including those without a disability. Accessible course content makes it easier for everyone to read and access your materials and can help improve overall quality and usability.
Example: Having a video with captioning or a transcript is important if you have a student with a disability. However, it will also make the video more usable for all students, allowing them to search through the video, re-watch specific segments, or view it in a high-noise environment like commuting.
Example: Ally’s alternative formats provide greater opportunity for everyone to access the information they need in the way they need or want it:
Ally provides every document with an accessibility score; a percentage score meant to reflect how accessible an item is, how many students it can affect, how severely it affects them, etc. To calculate the accessibility score, Ally takes a weighted average of the different accessibility rules/checks, as some rules are more important/impactful than others.
Ally uses the following thresholds for determining accessibility:
Ally’s course accessibility report includes an accessibility score for the entire course as well as Overview and Content tabs so that you can get specific details about the accessibility of your course content.
Learn more about the Course Accessibility Report.
Ally provides visual feedback on the accessibility of your course files with colored gauges next to your file names (Red, Orange, Light Green, and Dark Green). These indicators are only visible to instructors and TAs with access to your course. Students do not see the accessibility indicator icons.
Additionally, you and the students will see an Alternative Formats download icon beside each file in your course. Ally automatically generates “alternative formats” from your original course files, and makes them available for download so students can engage with course content in a way that works best for them.
Learn more about Ally for students.
Currently, Ally checks files in the formats listed below. There is no file size limit.
To learn more about identified accessibility issues, and begin to improve the overall score, click on the file’s accessibility indicator to open the Instructor Feedback Panel.
The Instructor Feedback Panel shows you an in-browser preview of a file and detailed feedback and support to help you fix the accessibility issues. The document preview feature is currently available for images, PDFs, Word, and PowerPoint files.
Click All Issues to see a list of issues and how much the accessibility score can improve after fixing each. This can help you prioritize high-impact issues, or focus on quick fixes first.
Learn more about the Instructor Feedback Panel.
Accessibility is very much a spectrum where further improvements are always possible, so it’s hard to provide a point at which the item becomes “accessible.” However, as a rule of thumb, once an item is in the green zone (67%-100%), it should be doing reasonably well.
There are many low-effort adjustments you can make to your course materials to start creating more accessible content.
Ally checks for captions in both embedded YouTube videos and links to YouTube videos and presents this information to you in the Course Report.
After files are attached to a course, Ally creates alternative formats of the file based on the original. For example, if the original file is a PDF, Ally creates audio, electronic braille, and ePub formats of the same content. These formats are made available with the original file, so everything is in one convenient location.
Alternative formats provide more opportunities for everyone to access the information they need in the way they need or want it. Although they can download alternative formats of your files, it is best to improve the documents through the instructor feedback panel.
At this time, Alternative Formats are not available for videos. Ally provides alternative formats for these file types:
These alternative formats can be generated:
Learn more about alternative formats.
You do not need to enable alternative formats. Ally automatically generates alternative formats.
When the alternative format for a particular content item is requested for the first time, Ally generates this on-demand. In most cases, the process is completed within 1-2 minutes. Ally then also caches the result, so any additional requests for the same alternative format can be served and downloaded from the cache immediately.
Contact the Office of Instructional Technology at OIT@law.gwu.edu for assistance using Ally.
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