During last semester CELT asked academic staff to nominate some modules in Course Resources to look at improving their accessibility. As part of this project two student digital champions worked on the content of these modules during an 8 week period using the Microsoft Accessibility Checker and Blackboard Ally to improve the accessibility score for their module. So here are the things we learnt from this project:
- A total of 82 files were updated during the 30 hours of work by the student digital champions.
- This work demonstrates that if you put in an additional 4-8 hours on making content accessible you can potentially increase the overall module accessibility score within Ally between 4-20%. This partly depends upon the complexity of the content and the amount of content in your module. For instance one module increased by 19%, updating 11 files in just 4 hours.
- Some of the increases were not as high as additional files were added to the modules during this period reducing the overall accessibility score. It is important to ensure any further content added is made accessible in order to maintain and continue to improve the accessibility of your course.
- The most common accessibility issues fixed were similar to those outlined in the Ally report with sufficient colour contrast and alternative text on images as the highest.
Look out for two blog posts from our champions about their experience in the coming weeks.