The Center for Transformative Teaching has partnered with University Honors for a Nov. 18 accessibility workshop open to all faculty, Institutional Equity and Compliance on an online resource and FAQ, and Information Technology Services on the Ally tool in Canvas to help instructors meet the April deadline for ADA Title II compliance for digital course materials.
Accessibility Workshop
University Honors and the CTT are co-sponsoring a hands-on work session on Nov. 18 from 2:15-5 p.m. designed to demystify the accessibility process and offer practical help — both in groups and individually. Faculty will bring their own course materials on their own laptop and work directly with an instructional designer, who will walk them through available tools and answer course design questions. Participants will benefit from taking UNL's Digital Accessibility Training in advance but it is not required.
To ensure enough instructional designers are present, interested faculty should RSVP in advance. The workshop will be held in the multi-purpose room between the Knoll Residential Center and University Suites.
ADA Title II FAQ
Since the deadline announcement for digital course materials to be ADA Title II compliant, instructional designers have been offering presentations and providing assistance to instructors. Through this work, they have collected the most common and important questions and collaborated with IEC to publish answers for campus. The FAQ is available on the UNL ADA website.
Ally Canvas Tool
In July, ITS added the Ally accessibility tool to Canvas. Academic Technologies will be holding a live Ally Remediation workshop on Nov. 4 at 11 a.m., which is open for registration.
Ally can be found in the left navigation of course shells and does a few helpful things:
- Scans Canvas content and flags accessibility issues, dividing them into two primary groups: “easiest issues to fix” and “fix low scoring content.”
- Provides an interface to remediate many of the most common issues such as missing ALT text and descriptions for images.
- Simplifies replacing non-accessible files with accessible ones without breaking links to that file.
- Creates additional content formats for items such as ePub, electronic Braille, audio, BeeLine, and Immersive readers. Explore these content types by using the small download arrow to the right of Canvas page titles. Note: these alternative content types do NOT replace the need to create accessible content.
To use the Ally tool with your Canvas course, click on “Ally Course Accessibility Report” in the left navigation. There are a few next steps you can take:
- Start working on the easiest issues fix.
- Learn more about using Ally in this self-guided course.
- Watch previously recorded Ally trainings available in the Academic Technologies Shared Folder .
- Contact an instructional designer assigned to your college to create a custom plan for remediation and a workflow for future content.
The best time to use Ally is at the end of the accessibility process. Use the source document's (e.g., Word or PowerPoint) built in checker when creating your file. Then, when you create the Canvas page that will be used to link to the document, use the Canvas accessibility checker to ensure that page is good. Lastly, when you prepare to publish your course and make it accessible to students, run Ally.