Alternative Formats
A beneficial feature is that it also enables students to download accessible alternative formats of published module materials, without the need to create and upload these ourselves. These formats are made available with the original file, so students can find everything in one convenient location.
While the alternative formats are created for you, you can, if you want, disable alternative formats for any individual content item for whatever reason (a good example being translated versions of texts on foreign language courses).
Alternative formats made available by Ally are:
- Tagged PDF;
- HTML;
- e-Pub;
- Electronic braille;
- Audio (text-to-speech conversion);
- BeeLine Reader;
Course Accessibility Report
Note: Course here is the Canvas terminology - a Newcastle 'module'.
The course accessibility report acts as a complement to the existing accessibility indicators. It provides an accessibility summary and overview at the course level.
The report shows instructors this useful information:
- Accessibility score for the course
- Distribution of course content by content type
- List of all issues identified in the course
Instructors see their course content items that have issues. Instructors can then access the instructor feedback from the report to fix the issue.
The report helps instructors determine priority, and gives options for order of fixing. For example, content with most severe issues first, or start with content that's easiest to fix.
See our guide on Ally Analytics.
A Baseline Score for Canvas Courses
There is no baseline score for each course as any accessibility issues must be looked at in context.
Colleagues can use the course reports and individual content indicators to build up a picture of the accessibility of their course content and in many cases a few simple steps (such as using alt-text for images) can have a really big impact on the accessibility score.
