Accessible Digital Course Content
TECHNOLOGY SUPPORT | CURRENT INITIATIVE

The majority of UTEP instructors use a Blackboard (Bb) course shell to teach their course(s). In fact, almost 1,300 instructors (data pulled from Eesysoft) used Bb for their spring 2018 course(s). Blackboard is an excellent platform to share digital course content with the students. Digital course content uploaded by instructors can be of many different formats: documents (i.e. Word, PDF), HTML files, images (i.e. jpg, png), audio, and video.

The university recently purchased Ally, an accessibility awareness product which integrates with a variety of Learning Management Systems such as Bb. Ally checks accessibility of all digital course content in Bb and assigns an accessibility score. Ally scores are provided in percentage points and classifies any content under 33% as having major accessibility issues while a score above 67% is classified as an accessible file. Ally’s institutional report indicates an accessibility average score of 49% or the last two academic years.

It is our intention to improve institution’s accessibility score within one year of initiating improvement related activities (see below). Once our accessibility score is increased, it is important that processes are set in place for the upkeep of such. Instructors’ cooperation and their understanding of accessibility is critical for the success of this project. Technology Support must provide our instructors with the necessary support, training and tools required to create accessible digital content. It is also our intention that once our instructors are prepared to create accessible digital content that our dependency in Ally will cease.

There are many systems other than Bb such as cloud storage and content management systems which can be used to share digital content. Digital content creators need to ensure that accessibility is built into their content creation process. This practice effectively improves content accessibility regardless of the system used to make such available.