As you know, we got a one year reprieve on the deadline to be compliant with the new DOJ web accessibility compliance standards (although there is a lawsuit pending on this). So we have a little less than a year to at least make significant progress on our web accessibility. With the Learning Technologies people, we are trying to get a push for Fall 2026 to improve our accessibility scores across all divisions.
As you can see below, for spring 2026, we are at about 73.5% accessible college-wide, based on Ally data.
However, if you look more closely, you can see we have quite a bit more work to do, The orange 73.5% is an overall score. The grey are on the chart corresponds to files:
As you can see, a little over half of all the files that are in our courses are accessible. This includes images, documents, and, of course, all these PDFs that need some serious remediation.
The outer circle is the WYSIWYG content, which is 93.8% accessible, so no big issues there.
But we need to work on these files.
Now, the overall data is not the most useful. However, the Ally administrative dashboard allows the LT and LMS managers to extract more granular data for divisions, departments, delivery mode, etc.
For instance, for my department, I can see an overall score:
You can see that sociology offered 51 sections in Spring 2026, with 3,324 items across these 51 sections, and an overall accessibility score of 80%.
And while 80% looks pretty good, we have the same issue with files:
We’re doing a bit better than college-wide, but not by much.
And, of course, the Ally dashboard can identify the types of issues that are present in the courses:
You can filter further, either by delivery mode or course numbers.
So here is my ask: please request that data from the LT department and dive in to see which parts of your curriculum might need the most attention and decide on a strategy for remediation to address your lowest scoring areas.
The good news is that Ally is adding more and more tools to do the remediation directly into Blackboard, especially fixing PDFs. Ally can already OCR PDFs, and they are working on a tagging tool that should come out soon.
If you use course shells that all your adjuncts are required to use, can you double-check that these shells are accessible? If individual faculty are in charge of their own course shells, can you nudge those who have the least accessible ones?
As always, help is available for training or for remediation with the Learning Technologies department.
Either way, since you guys are the ones with the most direct line to your program’s faculty (full-time and adjunct), I just thought I’d ask for your assistance with this.
