Improving access to course materials for all students
Blackboard Ally is a tool that helps enhance the usability and accessibility of course documents. Ally's two main functions are to:
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While Ally was designed to improve access to course materials for students with disabilities, our testing has demonstrated that many other students benefit. Non-disabled students have indicated a preference for the audio format (MP3) for longer documents so they can listen to them while doing other things like driving or when their eyes are tired.
What students will see:
Students will see a small Ally logo button to 
to the right of each document in Blackboard when they hover the mouse over the button the Alternative formats call-out box appears. For keyboard users, the button will appear when the keyboard focus moves to the button when tabbing past the document name.
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The accessible versions available will depend on the original document. The student may select the format that best meets their needs and select the Download button to obtain a copy of the original document in the selected format.
What instructors will see:
The goal of Ally is to assist instructors with learning techniques for enhancing the accessibility of course documents. There are no REQUIRED actions. However, it is intended that the Ally tutorials will provide enough information to improve the accessibility of current documents and apply these same techniques when creating future documents so they are accessible from the start.
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Blackboard does not discard the original version of the document. It is retained within the Blackboard system and can be retrieved if necessary.
For more information
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