Accessibility in your OWC -- and a tool for Blackboard users

Recently, a good friend and colleague visited my office to discuss a problem she was having with an upcoming online writing course she was to teach. Our institution's Disability Office was asking her to verify that her course was accessible.

While course accessibility is not only a key function of that office but an obligation of institutions and teachers, the problem was a disjunction between the way Disability wanted to examine/confirm accessibility and the way her teaching materials were designed.

The disjunction had several causes, and primary was the expectations of course "evaluators" and the course design/pedagogy of an online writing course.

Disability asked my friend, repeatedly, to deliver "documents" to them so those "documents" could be reviewed for accessibility.

But in an OWC, class artifacts often don't exist as discrete, file-like content to be delivered to students or others, especially if the course is well designed in conjunction with the LMS, in our case Blackboard Learn. That's just not the way many of us work. We don't lecture through slides. We don't provide canned modules. Courses are built dynamically around student written dialogues.

So, in my friend's class, many of her materials were embedded in or incorporated into the course interface, making it impossible to package and "send" them to someone to review. In looking at these materials, I found they were indeed well woven into the LMS.

So what was she to do?

Well, aside from our conversations, she went to our IT department. As I've mentioned to anyone I can, we have great IT support. They introduced her to Blackboard Ally, which, according to Blackboard's site, "is a revolutionary product that integrates seamlessly into the Learning Management System and focuses on making digital course content more accessible."

Ally is indeed an interesting accessibility product. It provides an "accessibility percentage" next to the artifacts and components of a course, and in many cases it includes helpful detail when items are not 100% accessible as to why, from uncaptioned images to tables without headers to the absence of ALT-text.

Some will especially love Ally's interface, as the use of percentages kind of gamifies the process: You can continue to "up" your percentage by uncovering and then addressing the accessibility obstacles in your course.

With Ally, my friend was able to verify the accessibility of her course. There was still a bit of a frustration, though, as Disability wasn't in clear contact with IT: This made me realize that Disability offices need to understand the kinds of on-campus tools that can help create accessible courses.

In the end it worked out well: She was able to help Disability understand there was a new tool to help with accessibility. Most importantly, she was able to offer an accessible OWC for her students -- while learning about a new tool that she can use proactively in the future.