Overview

Ally Course Accessibility Report and TidyUp provide instructors with important accessibility information for their Canvas courses. The Ally Course Accessibility Report gives instructors insight into how well their courses perform in terms of accessibility. The TidyUp tool lists all documents in a course, indicates whether each is in active use, and shows where each is located. This article provides a brief introduction to both tools and how they can help instructors increase their course accessibility.

Ally Course Accessibility Report

The Ally Course Accessibility Report scans Canvas courses for inaccessible materials. The tool supplies an overall accessibility grade for the course and a score for each course document. It rates inaccessible content on the severity of the accessibility issue and how “easy” it is to fix. For example, course images that need alternative text are marked as less severe and “easy to fix.” However, untagged PDFs are marked as having severe accessibility issues, and their remediation is more complex. The video below demonstrates how Ally works in Canvas.

Enabling Ally Course Accessibility Report in Canvas

The Ally Course Accessibility Report tool should already be enabled and automatically appear in the navigation links for Rutgers Canvas courses. To enable it in your course, if it does not appear:

1. Go to Course Settings.
2. Click on the Navigation tab.
3. Find Ally Course Report on the list of disabled tools.
4. Select the three buttons next to Ally Course Report and click Enable OR drag and drop Ally Course Report to the LTI-enabled list (the top list).
5. Hit Save at the bottom of the screen.

Strategies for Prioritizing Course Accessibility Remediation

Setting priorities and goals is a great way to approach remediation in a targeted way. Some options for beginning a remediation process include:

• Work on fixing the biggest barriers (Ally red score issues)
• Target the most important course material first
• Start with the easiest fixes
• Fix the material in a sequential order (prioritize the content in order of its use in the course)

It is important to note that content created within Canvas (e.g. Canvas Pages) can be fixed directly in Ally; uploaded content is fixed using the accessibility tools in the native software used to create the content (e.g., an inaccessible Microsoft Word document would need to be remediated in Word and then replaced in Canvas wherever the inaccessible document exists within the course).

Tidy Up

The TidyUp tool identifies outdated and unused course content, enabling instructors to quickly archive or delete old material to boost their Ally course accessibility score.

To use TidyUp, it must be enabled in the Canvas course. To enable it:

1. Go to Course Settings.
2. Click on the Navigation tab.
3. Find TidyUp on the list of disabled tools.
4. Select the three buttons next to TidyUp and click Enable OR drag and drop TidyUp to the LTI-enabled list (the top list).
5. Hit Save at the bottom of the screen.

This video outlines how TidyUp is used in Canvas.

Helpful Links

Rutgers Ally Support Documentation

Rutgers TidyUp Support Documentation

Rutgers Office of Information Technology Accessibility

For more support, please email IDT at itd@camden.rutgers.edu