Using Anthology Ally with Brightspace?

Hello,

At the last Brightspace Accessibility Interest Group meeting, someone had mentioned the Anthologies Ally tool that checks content for accessibility. This sounded like something that would be very useful to us, and we are beginning to look into this for our college (Central New Mexico Community College). Would anyone be interested in sharing information or their experience with the Ally tool? Thanks!

Best Answer

  • Jennifer.W.973
    Jennifer.W.973 Posts: 386 🎆
    Answer ✓

    We use it and the alternative formats is great for our students in the classic Content experience. However, the alternative formats do not show up for students in the New Content Experience (at least not yet) which is why we are not actively encouraging instructors to switch to the New Content Experience.

    On the instructor side, the Ally report is great but sometimes it can seem misleading when it says the score is 100% even though there might still be issues that it just doesn't catch. And there are some cases where it doesn't yet have tips on how to fix something. It also only scans the source code rather than the rendered code, so if more accessible HTML is added via JavaScript, it won't see it and report that it's missing.

    Overall I think it's a great tool and I'm glad we have it. Even just having the mp3 alternative format helps our instructors save time so they don't have to make their own recordings to include an audio version of their materials.