Ally is a Moodle plugin that scans and evaluates Moodle content for accessibility issues, suggesting improvements, and providing alternative formats for uploaded files. Each activated course has access to an Ally overview dashboard that lists all issues, in order from most serious to least, with helpful suggestions of how to resolve those issues. Ally will scan the text and files in your Moodle course and look for:
- Improperly applied headers in text and tables to aid with screen readers
- Color contrast issues for those with color blindness
- Scanned text documents that appear as images (ie, text is not selectable or able to be read by a screen reader)
- Missing image descriptions
- Videos without subtitles
- Links with missing text
- Note: Linked Google documents are NOT scanned
Additionally, Ally will examine uploads to the site, pointing out potential issues, and providing the option for students to download alternative formats to the file, including:
- HTML
- ePub
- Tagged PDF
- Electronic braille
- Audio
- OCR’ed PDF (screen readable)
- Immersive reader
- Translations
In order for Ally to be used in a course, it must first be turned on at the system level by iTech administration. Currently, not all courses have this turned on automatically. Once the course has been activated at the system level, you must enable the Ally filter as described below to complete the activation and begin analyzing your course and materials.
Note: If you follow the steps below and do not see the Ally icons appear, and clicking on the Ally Accessibility report from the left side menu displays The course accessibility report is currently not enabled for this course, you will need to request Ally to be turned on for this course through a HelpDesk ticket.
Turning on the Ally filter
In order to allow Ally to evaluate the uploaded course materials and text in your course, you must first active the Ally filter from your course settings. To do so, click on the settings wheel in the upper right corner of the course page, and select Filters from the drop-down list.
On the Filters page that opens, scroll down to the Ally option and click on the drop-down menu on the right side and choose On and click Save changes.
The page will refresh and a message, highlighted in blue, will appear at the top of the screen indicating that your changes have been saved. At this point you can return to your course main page using the menu options from the left side menu or the breadcrumb links listed at the top of the page underneath the course title. It may take a few minutes before Ally icons begin to appear to the right of the titles of your files, but refreshing or reloading the pages after a minute or two should result in the icons showing. If this does not occur, your course may need to be activated at the system level, as indicated above.
In addition to the Ally icons next to uploaded files, such as PDFs, PPTs, and DOCXs, you will also see a menu item near the very bottom of the left side menu for the Ally Accesibility report. This button will take you to the overview of the course and show all accessibility issues and ratings, and is also where any issues with text in Moodle (in things like Labels, Pages, and Descriptions of resources) will be highlighted.
For more information on working with Ally, see the Knowledge Base articles on the Ally Accessibility Report and Working on Ally Accessibility Issues.