In the fall of 2022, UNLV launched the Ally tool from Anthology. Ally provides course creators, instructors, faculty, and administrators feedback and guidance for improving the accessibility of digital content in their WebCampus course shells.

As a benefit for students, files that are within WebCampus that can be adjusted by Ally can be downloaded in these alternative or improved formats:

• MP3 audio
• ePub (an ebook format, which is better than PDFs)
• Electronic braille
• BeeLine Reader (a format adding a color gradient to the display, facilitating reading comprehension for all students but particularly for students with attention deficits, dyslexia, etc.)
• Tagged PDFs

When a course creator or manager saves content to a course, Ally checks for issues against standards and guidelines. Ally assigns content an accessibility score and then provides information on issues found and guidance on how to address and remedy the issues. Students do not see the scores or the score indicators that course creators or managers can see.

Each score has a numerical rating and an accompanying colored gauge. Red indicates a zero or low rating, orange indicates a medium rating, and green indicates a high school or perfect rating.

Support for Ally

The Office of Accessibility Resources provides one-hour overview workshops at least once a month and drop-in office hours for support with the results of the Ally tool. Visit our Training Calendar for more information.

• Microsoft Word files missing hierarchical heading style structure.
• Images without alternative text (alt text) or alt description.
• PowerPoint presentations missing alt text on images, missing titles, duplicate titles, missing reading order, or built without templates/layouts.
• PDFs with missing alt text or scanned PDFs of text. A poorly scanned PDF from a copier or desktop scanner can often be scored zero.
• Poor text color contrast, such as yellow text on a light background or blue text on a dark background.
• Tables without table headers.
• Media that could potentially trigger seizures or other harmful responses in students.
• Links without text that describes the target.

Ally judges content whether it faces students (“published”) or it is merely living within the file structure of the course but not yet student-facing (“unpublished”). Deleting legacy documents (like PDFs) that are no longer used or are never to be used in a course can immediately and noticeably increase the overall accessibility score of a course.