Ally Accessibility Platform – Spring Launch

Dear Colleagues,

I am pleased to announce that the university will launch the Ally accessibility platform during the spring 2023 semester. Used by several of our peer universities, the platform helps to improve your digital course content and make it more accessible and user-friendly for all students.

The Ally platform integrates directly with Canvas and provides simple, step-by-step guidance on how to present course materials in a way that best supports student success. Improving accessibility, which is a core feature of the platform, helps improve the learning experience for all students and ensures students with disabilities have better access to course materials. As an example, providing additional formats for required readings also improves usability for mobile devices.

From the beginning of the spring 2023 term through spring break, the Ally accessibility platform will be available to any UT faculty member who would like to opt-in and be a part of the initial, limited rollout. After spring break, it will be rolled out to all faculty and automatically enabled in all Canvas courses.

REQUEST EARLY ACCESS

Please note that there will be limited support for early adopters of the Ally accessibility platform. The university will be releasing comprehensive resources and tools for instructors leading up to the full rollout after spring break.

The Ally accessibility platform doesn’t change how anything works in your course and won’t affect your course files. Once it is enabled, you will notice red, orange, light green and dark green gauges next to your course files — these are “Ally Indicators” that show the accessibility of the files and are only visible to instructors in the course. Simply select the indicator to learn more about the issues and view step-by-step directions on how to fix them. I realize it may take some time to address some accessibility issues flagged by the platform, so we encourage instructors to make gradual updates to course materials.

The platform also generates alternative formats of your course files that can greatly improve students’ experience — allowing students to access HTML versions for their phones, ePub versions for their tablets, MP3 versions for audio and electronic braille versions.

I hope you will choose to opt-in to early access and see all that the Ally platform can do to improve the accessibility of your course content.

Sincerely,
ART MARKMAN, Ph.D.
Vice Provost for Academic Affairs
The University of Texas at Austin | Office of the Provost

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