Documentation for the Ally Course Accessibility Report

[tengrrl]

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for basic documentation for the Ally Course Accessibility Report. I have some basic questions that I'm trying to find answers for, but I can't find anything other than local school documentation from various colleges and universities. 

I'm looking for information such as how frequently the report reruns (e.g., every time you choose the command? once a week? whenever it feels like it?). I'm also wishing I could figure out from a report WHERE a problematic file is. For instance, Random.jpg has errors with contrast and whatnot, but I don't even use that file. I want to delete it, but I can't figure out where it is (not even with the CanvasCape search).

Can anyone point me in the right direction? 

Thanks for any tips!

Traci Gardner
Virginia Tech

[Jeff_F · Accepted solution]

Hello @tengrrl  - I am thinking that most answers would be available via the product documentation. For example, here is the link to the product resources information:  https://usergroup.ally.ac/s/resources/ 

This site also has a user community similar to the Canvas Community. See here:  https://usergroup.ally.ac/dashboard

Just to confirm, this is a product of Anthology (formerly known as Blackboard).

All the best, Jeff

[tengrrl]

Thanks, @Jeff_F.  That's what I was looking for (and not finding).

Traci

[paul_fynn]

Hi @tengrrl 

You'll find that the Ally (or A11y) report has quite a number of affordances once you start to get your head around it, including being able to work out what the DNA of each course  site is (in terms of the balance between files and wikis/pages, use of discussions etc). It also gives you a finger on the pulse for how many live students Ally believes there to be in each site, which can be useful against SIS views (and tells you whether it is worth chasing up a particular site, or whether it can be ignored). Combined with the Course Storage report data and unpublished courses data you can get some powerful insights as to what is going on.

Some points you may find useful.

• Where files are deleted or updated, Canvas won't adjust the score until after another file has been loaded
• In principle MSOffice accessibility checkers should enable authors to check slides and materials before upload to Canvas, in practice I'm not convinced they check the same things
• There is the abililty (for a single course) to export a list of individual content and its accessibility 
  • This is only available at the sub-account level, not at the course level, so permissions will depend on local configuration for the teacher role
  • It would be useful if Ally were to build this into the course level menu
  • It would also be useful to be able to drop the whole sub-account asset listing and score into a file for bulk management
• Low content is often old redundant content
  • It would be useful to be able to delete a low scoring content item from Ally, see what its file location is, and to see where exactly it is used and whether it is published
  • Our institution has restricted the ability (via js) of colleagues to import anything that hasn't been included in Modules/Module items (no direct file or folder import, no assignments etc..) which has dropped out old unused content
• There is a 'back to the future' problem which has been described elsewhere. Essentially content is loaded to site A. The content is then copied forwards to site B, and the diligent team update their content accessibility. When the content is copied from site B to site C, Canvas retrieves the unimproved content from site A...
  • This was happening because Canvas blockchain seemed to have errors, and seemed to affect New Quizzes and some App items (when a template icon was updated with a new icon under the same filename the App dropped the link). This may have been resolved by the recent work to iron out issues in New Quiz Banks.
• I haven't quite worked out how Canvas Ally differentiates between files, pdfs, and other file based content - they seem to live in different places / scores

Hope that's useful

cheers

Paul

[tengrrl]

Thanks for all these tips, @paul_fynn! I'm finding loads of "bad" files and images that I never used, which were imported from other courses by other people. At least these are easy to fix—just delete them!