But definitely use Ally.
If you haven’t yet used the Ally accessibility dashboard, I strongly recommend you start ASAP and then start working on whatever remediation your courses and files need. I would always recommend starting with the most serious issues because fixing those will greatly and quickly improve your accessibility scores. Not everything is fixable inside Blackboard, but a lot is, especially image descriptions.
How far should your remediation go? Well, as far as you can reasonably take it, I would say. The good news is that you only have to do all this work once. For starters, the fixes you apply with Ally and other accessibility tools will stick. This means that when you copy a course that has been remedied in Ally, the fixes will carry over. So once you’ve done the initial remediation (the tedious part), you will only need to monitor the new content and updates to your courses.
As I mentioned before, using Ultra docs is a good option to get accessible-from-the-start content, especially for content that is varied (some text, images, videos, other media, knowledge checks). The additional bonus is that you get to organize your content in blocks that you can resize and move until you find the best overall layout.
Use the accessibility checkers in your office suite.
But a lot of us do our work using office suites, be they Microsoft, Google, or LibreOffice or OnlyOffice (for the nerds like me who prefer open source products rather than tools from corporations whose founders are in the Epstein files). All of these suites offer accessibility checkers inside each application and you should use them before uploading anything into Blackboard.
As I have also mentioned before, Ally will flag any deviation from style sheets so use them (they make document navigation better for screen readers) or create your own.
Beware of third-party apps <cough> Canva </cough>.
If you use third-party apps or outputs from third-party apps, make sure that both the tools themselves and their outputs are accessible. I have been using Canva long before we got an institutional license, and the first time I ran the presentations I had created with it in Ally was, well, not fun. I don’t like powerpoint. I much prefer to use Canva, but now, I need to remind myself that whichever template I use will need quite a bit of remediation because any decorative element will need to be marked as such inside Canva. It’s not hard to do but depending on the template you use, that can be a lot of elements. The same issue comes up with a tool like Padlet. The accessibility options for the app are not great. I have also had issues (thankfully, rarely) with mind mapping apps.
So what should we do? First, check the accessibility options for these apps, and spend some time with their documentation (Padlet, Canva, for example). Specifically, look for a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) which is a detailed document that companies should have on their site. You can find Padlet’s here, and for Canva, you have to ask them (really?). Now, those can be pretty thorough and hard to read for non-specialists, so you might want to ask the Learning Technologies people to help you understand whether a tool or app is sufficiently accessible.
And what if an app is not accessible? Then, I’m sorry to say that we might need to reconsider our usage of that app, or at least, have a plan B for those students who won’t be able to use it. It’s also not a bad idea to reach out to the app to complain about it.
All of this is why the Learning Technologies office has created a more thorough process for integrations into Blackboard. If you have been using apps integrated into Blackboard through an LTI, or are considering doing so, you might want to have a chat with Tim Sweeney.
Apps are one thing, but what if you use entire courseware from a publisher? Well…
Start asking questions from sales reps.
They probably won’t have any answers to technical questions but they should know who to ask. Also give them deadlines for them to come back with answers, especially if those answers might influence your choices of course materials (Summer orders are due in March, and Fall orders are due in April). And yes, if the answers are not satisfactory, some reconsideration might be in order. And if, in your department, decisions are made for all the course sections, you need to know well in advance to make a decision, and potentially find replacements.
If you’re a chair…
Do you know what your adjuncts are using, if material decisions are individual? Are all your adjuncts aware of the new accessibility guidelines? Are they working on remediation? Are they familiar with Ally?
Last but not least:
As always, there is training and help available. The trainings are listed in the weekly LT newsletter. You can also go to the LT open lab and get some personalized help there. As with the Ultra transition, training is great, but at some point, we just need to sit down and do it.
But I would argue that we have to start doing more due diligence regarding apps, integrations, and courseware.
