Anthology Ally is a product that integrates seamlessly into Canvas and focuses on making digital course content more accessible. Ally automatically scans your original content in Canvas and generates Alternative Formats to make each file more accessible without altering the original file in any way. Ally shows Accessibility Indicators & Scores for each content file in Canvas. Indicators and scores are only visible to Instructors. Along with providing guidance, these indicators help improve the overall accessibility of files delivered to your students. The more accessible your original files are, the better the automatically generated alternatives will be.
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 new legislation and legal requirements worldwide aligns with this standard.
Ally uses three tools to facilitate accessibility:
- Instructor feedback
- Instructors can see immediately any accessibility issues with their courses and Ally provides remediation tools.
- Alternative formats
- Students can obtain an alternative format for any page in Canvas. This allows students to turn a web page into an audio file or PDF for easier reading or viewing.
- Institution reporting
- Collin College will have the ability to run reports for the institution and focus on common accessibility issues.
Learn how to use Ally at Collin College from the eLC staff.
Information for Faculty
When enabled, Ally automatically runs all course materials (published and unpublished) through an accessibility checklist that checks for common accessibility issues. Using advanced Machine Learning algorithms, Ally automatically checks digital course content and files uploaded by instructors, and provides feedback to instructors about the accessibility of resources. Ally also delivers guidance to help instructors improve accessibility of their digital course content.
The course accessibility report includes accessibility indicators on course content items by providing an accessibility summary and overview at the course level. The course accessibility report provides an overall score, and a view of the accessibility issues found in the course content. It also guides instructors to get started by addressing easy to fix issues, or lowest scoring items.
Ally will generate a range of more accessible alternatives for the instructor’s original digital content and will make these available to all students in the course. These alternative accessible formats include HTML, audio, ePub, electronic braille and more.
Information for Students
Students access course materials from a variety of locations and on a variety of devices. Ally allows them to engage with the course material in their preferred format. Some students may only have access on a phone or tablet and the HTML format works well for them. Other students may prefer to listen the content and can use the MP3 format. Ensuring that course content is accessible, allows students to choose their preferred method and creates a more inclusive learning environment.
Resources
Resources for Faculty
- Ally for Learning Management Systems
- Ally LMS Help for Instructors
- Accessibility Scores in Ally
- Ally Feedback Panel
- Accessibility Checklist
- View File Accessibility
- Ally Alternative Formats for Instructors
- Improve Content Accessibility
General Resources
- Ally Learn Help Page
- Anthology Community
Resources for Students
Quick Start PDF Documents
- Ally Basics
- Ally for Canvas
- Accessibility Checklist
- Course Accessibility Report
- Accessibility Indicators
- Instructor Feedback
- View All File Accessibility Issues
- Add Alternative Descriptions in Canvas
- Add Alternative Descriptions to PowerPoint
- Effectively Add Alternative Text
- Add Headings to a Word Document
- Add Headers to Tables in Word
- Remove Potentially Harmful Content
- Scanned PDFs
- Export a Word Document as a Tagged PDF
- Alternative Formats
- Section 508 Checklist
Release Notes for Anthology Ally
April 06, 2024 - Ally 2.9.3
Bug Fixes and improvements
Fixed an issue where the Ally Institutional Report was not displaying the full list of issues when a department, a course, or a domain (in Ally for Web) has more than 1000 issues. This prevented administrators from being able to correctly review and identify the priorities for fixing accessibility issues flagged by Ally.
March 22, 2024 - Ally 2.9.2
Bug Fixes and improvements
- Improved the descriptive text on the Vimeo configuration tab within the Ally configuration tool.
- Implemented additional performance and stability improvements in Ally’s file processing.
March 07, 2024 - Ally 2.9.0
Vimeo and HTML5 video caption checking is now available for HTML and WYSIWYG content
As part of our efforts to expand our support for more types of video content, Ally now can flag Vimeo or embedded HTML5 videos that do not have captions or may have automated captions. This helps instructors quickly identify if video content is accessible and increases the awareness of the importance of accurate captions for student video content.
Ally will identify and highlight videos from Vimeo and videos embedded via HTML5 within the Ally instructor feedback. Keeping with our current approach to scoring YouTube videos, flagged Vimeo and HTML5 videos will not change the overall accessibility scores and will be shown as 100% in the Instructor Feedback panel.
