Blackboard Ally is available in many different languages. Availability includes the Ally interface, as well as the alternative formats, including the audio format.

The audio alternative format is made available in a voice that reflects the language of the source document. It uses the most appropriate accent based on the location of the Ally deployment. For example, a user in North America would receive a North American English accent, a user in Europe would receive a British English accent and a user in Australia would receive an Australian English accent for an English document.

Blackboard Ally is available in these languages.

• Catalan
• Danish
• Dutch
• English, US
• English, UK
• Finnish
• French
• French, Canadian
• German
• Italian
• Norwegian Bokmål
• Norwegian Nynorsk
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Portuguese, Brazilian
• Spanish, American
• Spanish, Colombian
• Spanish, Mexican
• Swedish
• Turkish
• Welsh

Ally is supported on the same browser as the Learning Management System (LMS) it is accessed from.

• Google Chrome™
• Mozilla Firefox®
• Microsoft Edge®
• Internet Explorer®
• Safari®

Yes. When you copy a course, all alternative formats and instructor feedback will also be available in the new course.

NOTE: There can be a delay before everything is moved over to the new course.

When you archive a course, only references to file accessibility are available. Ally is a cloud service and will store the alternative formats on the Ally servers, which means that these are not pushed back to the LMS. The alternative formats will not be stored inside of the course archive, but the reference from the course archive will continue to be available.

In many cases, improving the accessibility of course content benefits all students, including those without a disability. Accessibility is often closely connected to the quality and usability of the course materials.

Example 1: Having a proper digital copy of a document instead of a scan makes the document more usable for all students. It might make the document easier to read, especially for low-quality scans, and it also allows students to search through the document and find specific content, copy and paste sections of the document, and so on.

Example 2: The Semantic HTML alternative format is fully responsive and mobile-friendly and makes it easier for all students to consume content on their mobile devices. The ePub alternative format makes it easy to change the visual display of a document and allows for annotations and highlighting to be added. The audio alternative format can be used during a commute, on a run, etc. The translated version alternative format can help second language students.

Example 3: Having a video with captioning or a transcript will make the video more usable for all students. It allows the student to search through the video and find specific parts, the video can still be watched in a high-noise environment (for example, commuting), and so on.

Example 4: Having an image with a quality description can make the image more usable for all students. It can help clarify the content of the image and how it connects to the surrounding context, it makes the image searchable, and so on.

Example 5: Providing a good heading structure for a long document makes the document more usable for all students. It provides an additional structure, which makes it easier to work through and process the content. It also allows for a Table of Contents to be generated, which can improve the navigability of the document.

The only difference you'll see within your course is that Ally provides an accessibility score for your files. The score is shown by a gauge icon next to your course files. Select the gauge to view and improve your file accessibility. You will also be able to see alternative formats option along with the gauge option.

Students will be able to see the letter A icon, which will allow them to see the alternative formats menu. Once they select the icon, students will see a menu to the left or right of each document. From this menu, they can select Alternative formats to access available versions they can download. Although they can download alternative formats of your files, it is best to improve the documents through the instructor's feedback. Please visit Ally for Student for more information. 

The original file stays in your LMS. Ally doesn't store a copy of the original, move the original, or delete it.

Ally checks YouTube videos for captions and presents this information in the institutional reports. Auto-generated YouTube captions are not considered to be valid captions and are not included.

Ally checks for both embedded YouTube videos and links to YouTube videos.

Within the Institutional Report, the "HTML: The HTML content contains videos without captions" column highlights the number of HTML content and files that have YouTubeTM videos without captions. In the export of the Institutional Report, the column name is HtmlCaption:3.

There isn't any instructor feedback or alternative formats available at this time for videos.

Currently, Ally checks files in these formats:

• PDF files
• Microsoft® Word files
• Microsoft® PowerPoint® files
• OpenOffice/LibreOffice files
• Uploaded HTML files
• Image files (JPG, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BPM, TIFF)
• WYSIWYG/VTBE content (Note: The results for WYSIWYG content only appear in the Institutional Report and Course accessibility report.)
• YouTubeTM videos embedded in WYSIWYG/VTBE content

Ally’s accessibility checklist is based on WCAG 2.1 AA (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). This is an international accessibility standard, and most of the legislation and legal requirements worldwide align with this standard.

Additionally, Ally also adds a number of additional checks on top of this that start to target the usability and quality of the course materials a bit more.

Ally includes content it can’t check for accessibility issues, such as ZIP archive and XML file, under “Other” in the institutional report. This content does not receive an accessibility score, does not contribute to the institution’s accessibility score and does not have an indicator or option to download alternative formats in the User Interface. For more information visit Ally Institution Reports. 

Contrast checks verify whether there is sufficient contrast between the text color and its background color. Text with poor contrast can be difficult to read for everyone, but especially for students with visual impairments such as color blindness.

Ally uses the contrast requirements specified as part of the WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines.

Use the Colour Contrast Analyser from The Paciello Group any time to check your content.

Ally provides alternative formats for these file types:

• PDF files
• Microsoft® Word files
• Microsoft® PowerPoint® files
• OpenOffice/LibreOffice files
• Uploaded HTML files

These alternative formats can be generated:

• OCR’d version (for scanned documents)
• Tagged PDF (currently for Word, PowerPoint and OpenOffice/LibreOffice files)
• Mobile-friendly HTML
• Audio
• ePub
• Electronic Braille
• Translated Version
• BeeLine Reader

When a particular alternative format for a particular content item is requested for the first time, Ally generates this on-demand. In most cases, this completes within 1-2 minutes.

As soon as it has been generated, the alternative format is downloaded. Ally then also caches the result, so any additional requests for the same alternative format can be served and downloaded from the cache immediately.

Ally currently only processes instructional content. For example, content added by someone with edit permissions in the course, such as the instructor or instructional designer. Ally currently does not process student content or student submissions.

The OCR’d version is made available as a tagged PDF.

The audio alternative format is made available as a downloadable MP3 file. We also add some of the extracted semantic information into the speech, which adds additional structure to the audio and makes it easier to follow.

Ally uses Braille Ready File (.brf) as the electronic Braille format. The braille code used depends on the language the document is in. For English documents, Ally uses Grade 2 Unified English Braille (contracted).

The Braille Ready File (.brf) format can be used for both electronic braille displays and braille embossers (printers).

NOTE: You still need to check whether a specific Braille embosser/printer supports the .brf format.

For more information visit BRF on the Accessible Instructional Materials website.

Instructors and administrators can turn off alternative formats for an individual content item within a course. For example, on a file uploaded to the course.

Nothing. Ally automatically picks up on any existing or new materials, runs it through the accessibility checklist, and makes the alternative formats available to both the student and the instructor.

No, there is no file size limit. There may be cases where the algorithm fails to generate alternative formats for certain large files, but Ally doesn't’t enforce a maximum file size.

Ally detects password-protected content, gives them a 0% accessibility score and provides guidance to help remove the password through the instructor feedback. Ally does not generate any alternative formats for password-protected content, as we can’t get access to the actual content.

Yes. You can turn off alternative formats for individual content items. If you change your mind, you can enable it again later.

This alternative format provides a machine-translated version of the instructor’s original into a total of 50 different languages and supports PDF, Word, PowerPoint and HTML documents.

Accuracy varies and depends on the type of language being used in the document. For example, if there is a lot of technical languages, complex sentence structure, and local colloquialisms.

The Translated Version alternative format is great for students enrolled in a course that is not in their primary language. The Translated Version is an ideal resource to compare with the original document when they are stuck or having trouble comprehending.

The Translated Version is currently available in the following languages:

• Afrikaans
• Arabic
• Bosnian - Cyrillic
• Bosnian - Latin
• Bulgarian
• Catalan
• Chinese - Simplified
• Chinese - Traditional
• Croatian
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• English
• Estonian
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Greek, Modern
• Haitian
• Hebrew
• Hindi
• Hungarian
• Indonesian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Malay
• Maltese
• Norwegian Bokmål
• Persian (Farsi)
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Romanian
• Russian
• Serbian - Cyrillic
• Serbian - Latin
• Slovak
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swahili
• Swedish
• Thai
• Turkish
• Ukrainian
• Urdu
• Vietnamese
• Welsh

Select All issues to see every issue in the file. This view shows you how much the score can improve by fixing each issue. Find the issue you want to start fixing and select Fix.

We provide every document with an accessibility score, which is a percentage score that is supposed to reflect how accessible an item is, how many students it can affect, how severely it affects them, etc. To calculate the accessibility score for a document, we take a weighted average of the different accessibility rules/checks, as some rules are more important or impact others.

Within the User Interface, we use thresholds for determining the color of the indicator.

Accessibility is very much a spectrum where further improvements are always possible, so it’s hard to provide a point at which the item becomes “accessible”. However, as a rule of thumb, once an item is in the green zone it should be doing reasonably well.

In-browser previews are currently available for these files:

• Images
• PDF Documents
• Word Documents
• PowerPoint presentations
• OpenOffice/LibreOffice files (Writer and Impress)

These previews are then used to identify where in the document specific accessibility issues can be found. Highlights are currently provided for these issues:

• Images without an appropriate alternative description
• Text fragments with insufficient contrast
• Tables without table headers
• The instructor feedback for other accessibility issues will just show the content preview without highlights.