WATCH and READ: Use Ally to Determine Accessibility [~5min]

The Canvas Ally tool helps you to improve the accessibility of your course materials for students with disabilities.  Note that Canvas Ally is available in CPP's instance of Canvas (canvas.cpp.edu), not in this "free" version of Canvas.

Watch this short (2m:41s) Introduction to Canvas Ally video. Links to an external site.

Accessibility Score Indicators

Ally measures the accessibility of each file in your Canvas course, providing a color-coded indicator that represents each file's level of accessibility:

  • Red low accessibility indicator Low (0-33%): Needs help! There are severe accessibility issues.
  • Orange medium accessibility indicator Medium (34-66%): A little better. The file is somewhat accessible and needs improvement.
  • Light green high accessibility indicator High (67-99%): Almost there. The file is accessible but more improvements are possible.
  • Bright green perfect accessibility indicator Perfect (100%): Perfect! Ally didn't identify any accessibility issues but further improvements may still be possible.

Ally provides scoring for many types of documents, including:

  • PDF files
  • Microsoft Word files
  • Microsoft PowerPoint files
  • OpenOffice/LibreOffice files
  • HTML files
  • Image files (JPG, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BPM, TIFF)

Accessibility Feedback & Improvement

Ally offers detailed feedback and support to improve the accessibility of your files Links to an external site..

Select the color-coded accessibility score indicator next to any attached file to open instructor feedback. This gets you step-by-step instructions for improving the accessibility of the document. Select All issues to review every issue in the file and decide what to fix first.

Screenshot highlighting instructor feedback for a Word document.
Screenshot highlighting instructor feedback for a Word document.

Tip: Improvement is the point! Achieving 100% accessibility for each document is not always  practical or possible.

Course Accessibility Report

The course accessibility report provides an accessibility summary and overview at the course-level, including:

  • An accessibility score for the entire course
  • Distribution of course content by content type (e.g. Word documents, PDF documents, Images, etc.)
  • List of all issues identified in the course

The course report helps you to prioritize: You can start with easy, common issues or focus on fixing fewer files with more severe issues.

Screenshot highlighting the course accessibility report.
Screenshot highlighting the course accessibility report.