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Instructional Designer

Brittany Goodwell

Quick Guide to Ally:

Enhancing Accessibility in BruinLearn

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Workshop Outcomes

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Recall the purpose of Ally in BruinLearn and its importance in creating an accessible learning environment.

Identify and interpret accessibility scores for course materials and understand how they impact student accessibility.

Apply Ally's recommendations to make course materials more accessible, ensuring inclusivity for all learners.

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Importance of Accessibility in Online Learning

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1. Equal Access for All Students

Accessibility ensures that all students, including those with disabilities, can access and engage with course content.
Provides fair opportunities for success by removing barriers to learning.

2. Legal and Institutional Compliance

Supports compliance with ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) and institutional policies.
Reduces the risk of legal challenges related to accessibility in education.

3. Enhanced Learning Experience

Accessible content benefits everyone, offering options like audio formats for mobile learners or captions for videos.
Enables diverse learning styles and improves usability for all students.

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What is Ally?

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Ally is an accessibility tool integrated within Bruin Learn to help improve the accessibility of course materials.

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How Ally works in Bruin Learn

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Images

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PDFs

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PDFs work much the same way. If the percentage on the gauge is low. Ally will display this and tell you the reason. Here we can see that the image on this PDF is missing a PDF. If you select How to add descriptions, Ally will walk you through the next steps. In this case you will likely have to upload a new version of the PDF once you’ve edited it in Adobe.

For accessibility, PDFs should be OCR-enabled, OCR stands Optical Character Recognition, so that screen readers can read the text. If your PDF isn’t OCR-enabled, Ally will notify you and recommend formatting changes to make the document accessible.

OCR ensures that text within scanned images or non-selectable text is converted into machine-readable text, helping all users, including those with visual impairments, access your content, so you want to check that your PDFs are OCR-enabled to ensure inclusivity for everyone.

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Generating Alternative Formats

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Thank You

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