Blackboard Ally* | Educational Technology Advisory Committee (ETAC) | Seneca Polytechnic

About

Blackboard Ally is a tool that supports faculty to improve the accessibility, and thus access, to the materials posted on their Learn@Seneca course. Faculty will see the accessibility indicators displayed alongside posted content:

Clicking on the accessibility indicators will show faculty the accessibility score of that content and provide step-by-step instructions on how to fix the accessibility issues. Faculty may also view an accessibility report of their entire course.

Blackboard Ally also provides access to alternative formats of the course content to students – for example, HTML formats for ease of use on mobile devices and audio formats. Each course item will display the Blackboard Ally icon  indicating alternative formats are available to the student.

License

* - Items with a Seneca-wide license have an asterisk

Blackboard Ally in part of Seneca’s Learn@Seneca license.

Tips for the tool

We suggest to reduce the amount of editing that might be identified by Blackboard Ally that you run the platform accessibility checker on your documents first then upload the documents to Learn@Seneca. See these links to information on running accessibility checks on Microsoft Office Products and Adobe.

Keeping Student Information Safe When Using Online Tools

The Quick guide to secure handling of confidential student information for faculty using online learning tools (PDF) (developed by the Teaching & Learning Centre and ITS) helps faculty choose secure online tools for teaching. The guide provides guidelines and examples to help faculty consider the information students might be giving up when using a new tool. It is intended for quick use of free or low-cost online tools and not for larger, more costly tools that require more rigorous data privacy vetting.

Examples

You may wonder what a Beeline Reader format looks like. Watch this short video that will display what a student would see.

Related tools

• N/A

Additional Resources

• Seneca’s What is Blackboard Ally: Blackboard Ally information from the Teaching & Learning Centre
• Getting Started with Blackboard Ally – Oct. 2020 (recorded workshop from the Teaching & Learning Centre)
• Articles in the Academic Newsletter:
  • Blackboard Ally is Coming to Seneca 
  • Game On! Going from red to green with Blackboard Ally 
• UDL and Blackboard Ally

Contact us

The Teaching & Learning Centre
✉ teaching@senecapolytechnic.ca