OAT is excited to introduce Ally - a new tool to help support student success through accessible course materials! Ally was piloted by our Accessibility Champions during the Spring 2021 term and is now enabled for all courses beginning in the 2021-22 Academic Year.
What is Ally?
Ally is a tool that benefits all students by improving the accessibility and usability of course materials. Ally seamlessly integrates into Canvas and automatically checks the accessibility of course content, provides feedback and step-by-step instructions for how to remediate specific accessibility barriers, and gives students access to alternative formats of your course content.
What you'll see in Instructor view
In a course, Ally displays a small gauge indicator next to each piece of content. These indicators are almost exactly like a stoplight. When the indicators are dark green, your content is ready to be accessed by students of all abilities. If you see a red or orange indicator, there are elements of the document that are not accessible and would benefit from attention. Depending on the color of the indicator, Ally provides feedback to guide you toward remediation of the problem its identified. 
Each course also has an overall accessibility “score” that is not visible to anyone other than teachers or system admins. The score is an informal guide only, and will not be used for personnel or course evaluation purposes.
Need help fixing your content?
Do you need help making your course content more accessible and wish there was someone who could help? Well, worry no more! OAT's team of remediation experts are available to help make your content accessible for you. Simply submit a work request form, upload the files, and we'll get right on it!
- Submit Accessibility Work Request
- Learn more about our Accessibility Services
Make your content accessible to all learners
Your class is full of diverse students with unique learning abilities. Providing them with more accessible content means they can choose formats that work best for them: HTML for improved reading on mobile phones, Electronic Braille for the visually impaired, and Audio for learning on the go. Ally automatically scans your original content and performs a series of steps to make them more accessible.
Ally automatically creates these alternative formats for all of your course files and makes them available for you and your students to download. Your original file will not be affected by the alternative formats.
Faculty support
Our Accessibility Champions are also available to provide assistance on a one-on-one basis:
| Faculty | Department | |
|---|---|---|
| Betsy Eudey | Gender Studies | beudey@csustan.edu |
| Brittany Desnoyner | Teacher Education | bdesnoyer@csustan.edu |
| Cassandra Drake | Liberal Studies | cdrake@csustan.edu |
| Kanwaljit Dulai | Biological Sciences | kdulai@csustan.edu |
| Karen Webster | Teacher Education | kwebster4@csustan.edu |
Ally Micro-Learning Documents
Learn about Ally one fix at a time. Walk through accessibility scenarios, and see how Ally feedback helps you improve inclusive learning in your course
- Ally accessibility indicators
- Add alternative descriptions to image files
- Best practices for image descriptions added through Ally for Canvas
- Remove potentially harmful content
- Scanned PDFs: An enemy to accessibility
- Add a library reference
- View all file accessibility issues
- Add alternative descriptions to PowerPoint images
- Add headings to a Word document
- Add headers to your data tables in Word
- Export a Word document as a tagged PDF