Accessibility in the LMS
Now that we are past the first couple of weeks of Semester 1, it may be a good opportunity to take a moment to reflect on the resources added to your LMS Subject, and to review the accessibility scores of those resources and the advice in the LMS on how the accessibility of the resource could be potentially improved.
The Bb ALLY service that is available through our LMS, appears as those little green, orange and red gauge icons on resources. These indicate a broad accessibility score for the resource.
For all subjects across the LMS, we have almost 100% well scored pages for accessibility - this is the score of our modules and page content in our subjects. However, the accessibility of our uploaded files is a different matter, with only a 36% accessibility score.
The main issues we would ask everyone to look to address are:
- Scanned documents have low contrast that make it difficult to read (I think we all know these ones, these are the scanned photocopies where the pages are quite dark themselves and the text isn’t clear) - 19,000+ files with this issue identified
- Documents without Headings defined (using headings in your word docs rather than just bold text and changing the font size helps here - headings allow the document structure to be identified and used as navigation for alternative access tools and formats) - 6,300+
- Images that are not described (clicking on the gauge icon allows you to immediately fix this in place for most files) - 4,500+ files
- Tables without Headers defined in the document - 2,400+ files
- Scanned documents or ‘Printed’ PDF documents where there is no text content for assistive technologies to actually use (eg the text is actually just a big scanned picture of a page) - 540+ files
If everyone could take a little bit of time to address the identified issues in our files, it doesn't just help our students with accessibility needs, but it also helps all our students with easier to use resources, and once fixed, they don’t need to be fixed again.
For further information on accessibility of content in the LMS, contact Learning Environments.