Staff Guide: how to find your module accessibility score and make simple fixes to improve the score.
Finding your Accessibility Score
You will find your Accessibility Score in the View Course and Institutional Tools section under the Books & Tools heading in the Details and Actions Menu.
Ally assigns each item of readable content an accessibility score and your overall score will open in a new tab/window as an Accessibility Report.
For a full list of content items checked by Ally, see the Accessibility Report Checklist
Scores range from Low to Perfect. In theory, the higher the score the fewer the issues however it is important to check your resources as Ally is only looking at the accessibility of content and not a readability/grammar/spelling check tool.
For more information on Ally Scores, see Blackboard’s Accessibility Scores Guide
What information will be shown in my Accessibility Report?
Most items of content uploaded will be given an accessibility score by Ally and then the whole module will receive an overall percentage score. There is a lot of information on the report page as well as guides on how to improve your score.
On the Accessibility Report page you will see:
- The overall module accessibility score (percentage).
- A Ring Pie Chart showing number of items scored and an overview of the severity of issues.
- A link to content requiring a quick fix, for example: add alt text to this image.
- A link to Fix Low Scoring Content.
- Remaining issues which can be sorted by severity, issue and number of content items affected.
How can I improve my accessibility score?
Whatever time you have, you can always fix or improve at least one piece of content. The Ally tool in Blackboard advises on how to make content more accessible.
For more information about how to improve accessibility scores, see Blackboard’s Improve Content Accessibility Guide.
Content with the easiest issues to fix
Select start under this section to be given a list of content items with simple fixes such as:
- Add alternative text/description to an image
- Mark an image as decorative
- An image used within a document such as a PowerPoint or Word file that needs a description
Low Scoring Content Items
Items in low scoring content will have a score that between 0 and 33%. Scanned PDFs will often fall into this category as they are untagged. There is usually a summary of why the content has a low score.
If you require help to do so, please contact iSolutions and explore our introductory course on Accessibility.
If you require help to improve the accessibility of content items and raise your accessibility score, please contact iSolutions and explore Digital Learning’s Blackboard introductory course on Accessibility.