When you are an ally, you are someone who promotes and aspires to advance the culture of conclusion through intentional, positive and conscious efforts that benefit people as a whole. You foster relationships based on trust and accountability with marginalized individuals or groups. This requires that your effects not be self-defined and that your work is recognized by those who you are seeking to ally with. One such way of doing accomplishing this is to adopt inclusive teaching practices.
Blackboard Ally is a tool that can assist you on your path
to promote inclusive practices. This platform tool scans for inaccessible content
and offers advice for faculty on remedying inaccessible content. Besides contributing
to courses accessibility, the tools also promotes principles of Universal
Design for Learning, by offing students’ alternative formats to the content
within the course. Impressively, it does this while being architecturally agnostic,
i.e., Blackboard Ally works in D2L, Moodle. Canvas as well as Blackboard Learn.
Content is reviewed and a gauge illustrate how accessible it
is. Those with a low rating will appear
in red while highly accessible content will have a green color. Only faculty see this gauge and selecting it
will provide the specific issues, if any, with the content and solutions to fix
those issues. This can help guide
faculty through developing a perfectly accessible course.
Another feature of Blackboard Ally that helps promote inclusion is that alternative content option it provides students. At a click of a button, students can have the content presented to them in various modalities, including: Tagged PDF, Beeline Reader, or MP3 Audio. This can not only benefit students with disabilities, but all students can choose the modality the best suits they way the need to learn. Likewise, Blackboard Ally can translate material in over 75 languages. This can be very helpful to any student wishing assistance because English is not their first/preferred language.
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