Following on from Part 1 of The Perfect score – web accessibility for all series, in this post Academic Jane Hickey shares her 4 key learnings from making her LMS site more accessible.
“The tool makes it so easy,” Jane says, “it highlights what the issues are and tells you how to fix them.”
Jane Hickey used the Web Accessibility Indicator (WAI) tool from Blackboard Ally to address accessibility issues in her unit site.
The good news is that the entire fix took Jane only 1 Hour 45 min over 4 days (this included updating the unit site with the modified documents).
As you can see from the screenshot below, Jane’s unit site had a 91% score overall. 21 documents were flagged with “easy to fix” issues and 11 documents had medium scoring.
Jane’s 4 key learnings
- This task can be completed in small chunks over time i.e. one session class at a time.
- Lots of spaces LMS sites will already have green and yellow indicators, so it didn’t feel like I was a complete failure with a huge task ahead of me.
- I am very motivated by percentages and enjoyed watching the indicator change!
- Moving forward, I will apply what I have learnt about accessibility whenever I design teaching resources so that the content I create is already accessible from the beginning.
Thanks to the Web Accessibility Indicator and Alternative Formats, VU can now offer a better learning experience to ALL our students. One could say by lowering the barriers to accessibility, we are also equally setting up all our students to learn and succeed.
“This is an awesome, exciting step and I am so privileged to be part of this change at an institutional level!” says Jane.
Next week The Perfect Score will look at the student experience of using the Alternative Formats tool…
Further resources
Visit Blackboard Ally’s website
