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Case study: Using accessibility reports to enhance module VLE sites

Criminology, Department of Sociology
Carol Robinson

Carol Robinson outlines how Blackboard Ally is used in the Department of Sociology to improve the accessibility of the department's VLE sites.

After providing a short demo of accessibility reporting within Ally, Carol describes the process of using Ally which has been agreed the Departmental Teaching and Learning Committee (DTLC). Each module lead checks the accessibility report for their module's VLE site before sharing it with students, flagging issues to the creator of the materials to resolve. The DTLC has set targets: content scoring below 80% should be flagged, and content scoring below 75% must be improved. This system has been in place since early 2024. Despite some challenges in making learning materials more accessible, particularly in dealing with statistics and graphs, feedback from colleagues suggest that the process is working well.

Looking ahead, the department's plans include:

  • trying to better support staff in their use of Ally through, for example, clearer signposting to the resources and training available in the university.
  • seeking feedback from students about their experiences of the materials provided.
  • embedding a more consistent approach to developing student skills and awareness of the need for digital accessibility practices as a transferable skill.
  • Reviewing the targets and possibly aiming for a higher rate of accessibility across the board.

Watch their presentation:

Using accessibility reports to enhance module VLE sites (Panopto viewer) (8 mins 18 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

Hello. I'm Carol Robinson. I'm a senior lecturer in criminology in the Department of Sociology. I'm going to be briefly talking about how we, as a department, use the accessibility reports available through Blackboard Ally to enhance the accessibility of the learning materials we put on our module VLEs.

For anyone not familiar with the image on the slide, it's a screenshot of part of the Blackboard Ally dashboard that provides a percentage assessment of the accessibility of the VLE site.

In this talk, I'm going to briefly explain how to create an accessibility report so that we're all clear what I'm talking about. I'm also going to explain how the Department of Sociology uses this functionality of Blackboard Ally and the accessibility reports we can generate to enhance the accessibility of our module VLEs. I'll briefly outline some of the feedback from academic colleagues about doing this, and I'll end with some ideas about how we might develop our approach further.

Generating an accessibility report is fairly easy. Blackboard does all the work for you. We've got just 2 steps. On the module VLE, there's a menu on the right hand side, which includes books and tools highlighted here on screenshot. If you can't see this menu on a laptop, it sometimes happens. It may be that you just need to shrink the page a bit to fit onto your screen. Within books and tools, you just choose Accessibility Report and that's it.

A moment or two later, the report will appear. What you get is two tabs, the first of which 'overview', has a dashboard. This shows at the top left a score as a percentage, and a sort of speedo graphic, which changes colour from red to amber to green depending on how accessible the document is. Green is the most accessible.

You get the score again in the middle of the infographic, which shows the count of different types of content, Ultra pages, presentations, word documents, etc. in a range of colours. And you can also see on the dashboard the number of items with the content with the easiest issues to fix, in this case 13 and the number of items in the lowest category, in this case five items which are kind of medium scores rated amber. Next to each of those, you've got a start button which will take you to the items which would benefit from some attention. And you also have a list of individual items below, which can be arranged by severity or by type of issue. The content tab is less visually appealing, but it's another way of listing items with information about the issues or the number of issues and the score, which you can arrange lowest to highest to help you spot what is less accessible.

Where blackboard Ally's accessibility reports get really useful is the ease with which you can then identify the precise issues with a file or VLE content, and upload a corrected version. From either of the two tabs I just mentioned, you can click on the item, get instant information about what is negatively affecting its accessibility, and what you need to do to resolve this. So you can see in the graphic on the slide the name of the document, in this case contextualising your literature search, the percentage it scored in this case 43, and a summary of the issues, in this case, this document contains images without description - A fairly common problem. This links to further information, the what this means and how to add descriptions buttons and Blackboard will also generate a preview highlighting the precise section which is problematic. There's also a help function linked to from the bottom left of the screengrab. Once you've resolved the issue on the original file, you just drag and drop it onto the accessibility report. It gets uploaded to the same place on the VLE, automatically replacing the file that was problematic.

So equipped with this, in October 2023, I took a proposal to our teaching and learning committee (DTLC) intended to help make us as a department more compliant with the regulatory requirements on higher education institutions to ensure online services are accessible to all. This was timed to coincide with the launch of the new VLE platform and make use of this additional feature that it offers.

What we do now is pretty simple. With the DTLC's agreement, each module lead is tasked with checking the accessibility report for their module's VLE site before it's shared with students. The module lead then flags up any issues with the member of the teaching team who kind of created that particular item, and it's up to that person to then resolve it. It's a pretty simple system, it's fairly time efficient. We keep it going with a regular reminder from the chairs of the Departmental Teaching and Learning Committee, who email all relevant colleagues about pre teaching tasks anyway.

The DTLC agreed some targets. Any content scoring less than 80% should be flagged with the relevant colleague, any content scoring less than 75% needs to be improved. There's a bit of wiggle room in this in that while we hope any content scoring less than 80% will be improved, we're not requiring it unless the score is less than 75%. And while 100% every time would be lovely, we know that there are sometimes glitches in the software. One of the benefits of setting targets linked to the scoring approach of Blackboard is that they give colleagues instant feedback, have them at the target or not. It also reveals an unexpected but productive rather competitive streak, should we say, in some colleagues.

We've been taking this approach for a while now, since the start of 2024. So at the Department of Teaching Away Day at the start of this year, I asked colleagues for some feedback.

Most module leaders at the away day reported using the accessibility report. Most staff use it to check the learning material that they've produced. And colleagues are looking at both the modules score, the kind of overall percentage, but also the score per item. Interestingly, at least one uses the accessibility tools in Microsoft before they upload things onto the VLE. I don't have any details about this, but I do find it intriguing. And if I hadn't asked for anonymous responses, I'd be following this one up.

Colleagues like the mechanism that is used for the feedback, the kind of good score, and the green icon - one talked about green meaning good to go, which I rather like, but as I said earlier, colleagues do spot limitations in software. That said, most colleagues are finding it easy to achieve scores of over 80%.

What we've been doing has been useful to get colleagues to engage with the requirements for the VLE to be accessible, and Blackboard's accessibility reports certainly make achieving accessible VLEs easier. Staff have flagged up that they would like further training and demonstrations. And one way we're going to be addressing this is by better signposting to the resources available in the university.

We also know that we need to encourage students to develop their skills and awarenesses. The VLE content with the most persistently low scores is that produced by students, such as sample assessments or workshop outputs from students that are posted by staff onto the VLE. One way I'm starting to address this in my own teaching is to include briefings and reminders about what makes a document accessible in the instructions I gave for a relevant seminar task, where the output is going to be something like a slide or a Google Doc that can be shared on the VLE. Where I'm doing this, students are embracing it and recognising this is another transferable skill that they're developing. But as a department, we probably need to embed a more consistent approach to this and do more to encourage our students to use the guides, and attend the training that is available to them.

There was also a suggestion at the Teaching Away day that we should seek feedback from students about how they are finding our resources now. We, like lots of departments and schools, have student module feedback surveys at the end of each semester. But there's a concern that one of the things students say they like - more pictures on slides - is at odds with the kind of slides some colleagues are now producing in their efforts to make learning material accessible.

We've also got some work to do, and Lilian has helped here by sharing resources to tackle some of the harder to fix issues with learning material that's heavily reliant on graphs and stats.

And lastly, I keep wondering whether we might want to revisit the targets we set and aim for a higher rate of accessibility as the norm. That needs to be decision for the Departmental Learning and Teaching Committee, and it's something I think we might come to.

Thank you for listening.