It’s a crowded space. Conversations overlap. Voices collide as friends, colleagues, and classmates compete to be heard. In one corner of the room, a student opens a video lecture and struggles to hear their professor’s voice above the noise of everyday life at the University — even with earbuds.
Captions on, class can continue.
Accessible learning technology makes education for all students more achievable. Video subtitles, for example, aid students in noisy atmospheres, who are hard of hearing, or whose second language is English. Transcripts are valuable quick references where keywords can be searched, and concepts can be reviewed without watching entire videos. In other cases, features — such as adjustable text sizes and color contrast settings — are vital for students with low vision.
Yet, creating accessible teaching materials is time consuming and requires specialized training. To empower faculty — and improve learnability via the University’s digital system, Canvas — UT Austin launched the Ally accessibility platform in March 2023. One and a half years later, its impact is resonating across campus.
Ally scans uploaded content and provides step-by-step guidance to enhance the accessibility of learning materials. It also generates a variety of downloadable formats of course files to support students’ experience — such as ePub versions for mobile devices, and audio or text-to-speech options, among others. Since its debut, the use of Ally has increased steadily and significantly across campus.
Jeff Freels, Director of Assessment, Research, & Evaluation in Academic Affairs and Ally administrator emphasized that “Digital accessibility benefits everyone in higher education and ensures that all students, regardless of their abilities or disabilities, can effectively engage with educational content and services.”
Digital accessibility benefits everyone in higher education and ensures that all students, regardless of their abilities or disabilities, can effectively engage with educational content and services.
Since Spring 2023, Ally has seen a 74% increase in unique users. As awareness of Ally has gone up, faculty and students have been downloading more accessible content per week — increasing from 2,424 downloaded files each week in Spring 2023 to 3,776 every week so far in Fall 2024. Overall, since it was adopted, the platform has seen over 155,000 files downloaded by 33,000 users in nearly 12,000 courses across campus.
Spurred on by the adoption, Freels and his team used Ally data to investigate how accessibility and Canvas webpage design intersects with student success. They discovered that sites with too much or too little content can be a barrier to success based on the number of students that failed or withdrew from courses. The team also found a wide range of Canvas design schemes — from sites with extremely minimal designs to those with masterful structures and guides. This variation makes it difficult for students to navigate learning expectations between courses.
Combining these data with prior research, they developed a set of suggestions for effective Canvas use. For example, sites that include a welcome message and overview help students orient themselves to the content. Additionally, Canvas entry pages should include text that clearly directs students to the syllabus. For course sites with large numbers of files, the team recommends that instructors use clear filenames and a descriptive folder structure so students can find learning materials.
“Today’s undergraduates entered higher education with elevated expectations for digital learning experiences compared to their pre-2020 counterparts,” said Freels. “Institutions must continually evolve their digital offerings so technology is leveraged not just as a tool for convenience, but as a means to deepen understanding, foster creativity, and prepare students for a technology-driven workforce.”
Freels and his team are advocating for the expansion of services like Ally. The Digital Accessibility Center (DAC) was established in ITS in early 2024 to be a centralized hub that supports the entire scope of digital accessibility at UT Austin. A team of experts, including graduate and undergraduate students, helms DAC and provides training and services, like identifying and fixing accessibility issues for course and campus materials.
Whether a student is reading a transcript in a crowded room or requires text-to-speech because they broke their arm scootering down Speedway, learning options give every student a greater opportunity to succeed by reducing barriers to content. Freels and his team are proud of the strong framework for digital accessibility that UT Austin has laid, and plan to continue promoting awareness, providing education, and supporting improvements in the future.