Ally Accessibility Checker

Improve the Usability and Accessibility of Your Content

Your class is full of diverse students with unique learning abilities. Providing them with more accessible original content means they can choose formats that work best for them: HTML for improved reading on mobile phones, Electronic Braille for the visually impaired, and Audio for learning on the go. Ally automatically scans your original content and performs a series of steps to make them more accessible:

Generates alternative formats for students to download
Provides accessibility scores
Gives instructors feedback on how to improve your accessibility score

As an instructor, there is no action required for Ally to perform these tasks. Through the Ally integration, any documents within a Canvas course will automatically be processed. Typically, you should see your accessibility score within a few minutes. This may take longer if your content is complex, or if you have a lot of course content and it is being assessed all at once. FYI, Ally is a tool that runs in the background of your course and Accessibility results are only viewable by instructors, TA's, and admins; they are not available to students.

This brief video provides an overview of the Ally tool:

Accessibility Score Indicators

Ally measures the accessibility of each file attached to your course and shows you at-a-glance how it scores, using icons of differently colored dials. The scores associated with those icons range from Low to Perfect. The higher the score, the fewer the issues.

Red = Low: File is not accessible and needs immediate attention.
Orange = Medium: File is somewhat accessible and should be improved.
Light Green = High: File is mostly accessible but could be improved.
Dark Green = Perfect: File is fully accessible. No improvement needed.

For files with Low to High scores, Ally shows you the issues and gives a step-by-step guide on how to fix them. Find a file and select the accessibility score icon. Select All issues to see every issue in the file and decide what issues to fix first.

Course Accessibility Report

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 Accessibility Report option displays in the Canvas course menu if you have enabled it in Settings/Navigation. Students do not see this menu item, even when it has been enabled within a course.

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.

This 5-Minute Mastery video walks through how to access and navigate the Ally Accessibility Report in your course:

Alternative Formats

Ally creates alternative formats of your course files based on the original materials. These formats are made available to students alongside the original content in your course, so students can find everything in one convenient location.

Instructors do not need to do anything for the alternative formats to be created, this happens as part of the Ally process. To see the different formats available, select the Alternative Formats link next to the file name. Choose any of these options and then Download to get an example of what will be available to students.

This is a list of alternative formats available to students for materials that have been procseed through the Ally tool. The formats options will vary depending on the type of material.