Ally Instructor Guide

The Centre for Accessibility (UBC Vancouver) and Disability Resource Centre (UBC Okanagan) help ensure that all students can meet the essential requirements of their courses. The centres facilitate academic accommodation for students who have a disability or ongoing medical condition that impacts their access to or engagement with activities. Accommodation services include arranging for specific students to receive course content in alternative formats, view closed captioning or sign-language interpretation of course content, access assistive technology, or use alternate exam arrangements.

The tool Ally scans your Canvas course and flags potential accessibility issues that might prevent all students from accessing the content. You can use the tool proactively—without accommodation requests or outside facilitation—to create content that works for most students. Ally also converts certain types of Canvas course content into alternative formats, which any students in your course can use. Alternative formats can benefit students by giving them more agency in how they engage with content and potentially improving focus.

A screen reader is software that “reads” a regular screen to the person using it. The entirety of the content on screen is communicated through speech or braille (i.e., using a touch keypad), and the person using the screen reader must navigate and engage with the content based solely on these cues.

Screen readers are essential to people who are blind or visually impaired. They may also be used by people with learning disabilities that make text challenging to read or by people with physical limitations that make a mouse or touchpad challenging to maneuver.

The University of California, San Francisco has a short screen reader demo that may be helpful to view. It demonstrates how accessibility improvements—similar to the changes that Ally may suggest—impact a person’s experience with a screen reader.

Ally uses accessibility terms that may be new to you. A few frequent terms are defined below.

• Decorative images: A decorative image is any image you use for design purposes—for example, to break up the text or to provide visual interest. A decorative image can be removed from the text without any loss of understanding. It can therefore be designated as decorative, so screen readers do not try to read it.
• Headers: A header is the row or column of a table that has been specifically designated as the table’s header in the application or text editor it was created in. Headers must be designated in this way to be accessible; it is not enough to visually differentiate headers by styling the first row/column of a table, since the visual change cannot be read by a screen reader. Applications like Word will typically allow you to designate headers using a style or another shortcut from the editing menu.
• Headings: A heading is text that has been specifically designated as a heading in the application or text editor it was written in. Headings must be designated in this way to be accessible; it is not enough to visually differentiate headings with your own style (e.g., by bolding or increasing the font size), since the visual change cannot be read by a screen reader. Applications like Word will typically allow you to designate headings using a style or another shortcut from the editing menu.
• Heading structure: Headings have numbers associated with them that indicate the level of importance they have in the content. The heading levels you use create an outline or heading structure for the content. This structure should have a logical flow as you move through the content, starting with at least one first-level heading and using lower-level headings as indicators of any subsections.
• Image descriptions (aka alt text): An image description is different from a caption; it is text attached behind-the-scenes to an image that describes its content. This description will be what a screen reader reads to people who cannot see the image. Image descriptions are also helpful for students whose computers and/or internet connections are slow or unable to download images—in place of the image, they will see the description.
• OCR: OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition and refers to how characters (aka letters) in a scanned digital file can be converted to readable / editable text. Using OCR is important, as it allows screen readers to read the document, rather than see it only as an unreadable image. OCR can be applied with Adobe Acrobat Pro. Ally will also automatically attempt to generate an alternative format that it is “OCR’d” of any scanned digital file.
• Tagging: Tagging is a way of adding behind-the-scenes structure to a PDF document, so people who cannot see the document can still understand it when using a screen reader. Tagged PDFs identify each piece of content as a particular type (e.g., paragraph, table cell, image). Tags can be added automatically using Adobe Acrobat Pro (though the automated process should be double-checked for accuracy) or, if you are using a Word document, by saving the document as an accessible PDF.

All UBC faculty and staff can download Adobe Acrobat Pro for free.

Ally assigns your course and each piece of content in your course an accessibility score of 0-100%. This score is intended to reflect how accessible the content is for people with vision or hearing impairments and similar learning barriers.

Accessibility scores are calculated by Ally according to the potential accessibility issues found in each piece of content. A low score means that Ally believes the content has severe and/or multiple accessibility issues for some students. A high score means that Ally believes there are minor or no accessibility issues.

The accessibility scores can help guide you to key areas for improvement. But deciding what you want to improve will be determined by additional factors: the importance of the content in the course, the available guidance in Ally, the feasibility of making changes to the content, and the pedagogical impact of the suggested changes.

It may be difficult or even impossible to achieve a high accessibility score for the course or for every piece of content, and that's okay. The goal of using Ally is to improve accessibility where you can. There is no specific score you need to aim for, and even a score of 100% may have room for improvement, as Ally cannot check for all possible accessibility issues.

Students do not see accessibility scores, dial icons, or the “Accessibility Report” in the Course Navigation. Once Ally is turned on in a course, the only change for students is that they will have access to alternative formats of certain types of course content.

How long each type of accessibility issue takes to resolve depends on several factors: the guidance Ally provides (or doesn’t provide), your previous accessibility / technical experience, and how easy it is to edit the flagged content as suggested.

For example, adding an image description may be less time-consuming, since Ally helps you write and save this description in the help panel in Canvas. Adding headings to a PDF made from a Word file can be less time-consuming, if you have the original Word file handy, or it can more time-consuming, if you will first need to track the original file down. Replacing handwritten or annotated slides will likely be more time-consuming, as you may need to strategize then execute an appropriate replacement approach.

The best way to get a sense for the time commitment required for each accessibility issue is to try fixing a piece of content with that issue. You may find that many issues can be resolved relatively quickly, once you learn what you need to do.

Yes, once Ally is turned on, any instructors and teaching assistants for the Canvas course will see the accessibility scores and be able to make changes.

Improving accessibility proactively in your course is good practice in general:

• It can save time. If most of your content is ready for a variety of students to engage, there may be less to do when an academic accommodation is needed for an individual.
• It may remove the burden for marginalized students of having to ask for help. Due to the administrative and emotional burdens involved in “proving” a need for academic accommodation (e.g., a formal diagnosis by a doctor), requests can make these students feel vulnerable.
• It assists students who may not know to ask for help or be able to ask for help. Not everyone realizes their accommodation needs or qualifies for formal assistance. Many students can benefit from improved accessibility—for example, being able to listen to content instead of reading it on a screen.

However, improving accessibility proactively is a recommendation, not a requirement. Students who need help meeting the essential requirements of their courses can receive it from the Centre for Accessibility (UBC Vancouver) and Disability Resource Centre (UBC Okanagan). If you do not fix the content that Ally flags, you will not prevent anyone from learning.

For example, a common issue flagged by Ally is a scanned PDF that is not readable by a screen reader. Ideally, you would be able to update this file to make it readable by a screen reader. But if you cannot resolve this issue, students who need the PDF on a screen reader can still go to their accessibility centre for assistance.

Some content that Ally flags may be difficult or impossible to change. For example, you may not be able to edit it (e.g., you don't have the original file, you are using a screenshot that doesn’t make sense to edit) or editing it might have a negative pedagogical impact.

Not being able to fix all flagged content is okay. Ally is intended as a tool to guide possible improvements to your course content and increase accessibility where you can. Ally is not intended to mandate any changes to your course or your style of instruction.

Ally will typically provide 5-7 alternative formats for the content that it converts. To see and download the available formats, you and your students can click the alternative formats icon (an ‘A’ with a down arrow beside it) next to the content title.

The specific file types will be set by the type of content you are converting. These may include the following:

• OCR’d version of scanned files: OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition and refers to how characters (aka letters) in a scanned digital file can be converted to readable / editable text. Using OCR is important, as it allows screen readers to read the document, rather than see it as an unreadable image.
• Tagged PDF: Tagging is a way of adding behind-the-scenes structure to a PDF document, so people who cannot see the document can still understand it when using a screen reader. Tagged PDFs identify each piece of content as a particular type (e.g., paragraph, table cell, image).
• HTML: HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language and is the standard markup language which allows documents to be displayed in a web browser. When Ally creates this alternative format, it also makes the HTML mobile-friendly, so students can view the content on their phones.
• ePub: ePub is short for electronic publication and is file that can be read in most eBook readers on a smartphone, tablet, e-reader (e.g., Kindle), or computer. To open an ePub file on the computer, you can download free programs, such as Adobe Digital Editions or Apple Books.
• Electronic braille (.brf): BRF stands for Braille Ready Format, a file type which allows storing and retrieving combinations of braille dots. These dots can be displayed on a braille embosser, printed on a braille printer, or spoken by software that supports braille-to-speech functionality.
• Audio (.mp3): Audio files allow the content to be listened to aloud, similar to a screen reader.
• BeeLine Reader: BeeLine Reader files are a type of HTML that loads in a web browser, but with customizable view options. You can choose a colour scheme for displaying the content, which is intended to ease and speed up reading, with gradients guiding your eyes through long blocks of text.
• Immersive Reader: The Immersive Reader enables text to be read aloud while viewing it. The text can also be customized, such as by changing the size or highlighting specific parts of it like nouns or verbs.

You can learn more about alternative formats and their potential benefits on the Ally's student help page.

Since alternative formats are created automatically, they may contain occasional inaccuracies. We suggest spot-checking a few alternative formats, particularly for content that is critical to course comprehension or contains complex presentations of formulas, equations, or diagrams. You can then remove the alternative formats option from any content that is being incorrectly converted.

This removal can only be done for one piece of content at a time. If you want to do this for multiple pieces of content, you will unfortunately have to repeat the process for each item.