How to Read your BruinLearn site’s Ally Course Accessibility Report
Bruinlearn’s Ally Course Accessibility Report can be used to review your Bruinlearn site for accessibility issues and provide suggestions on how to fix them. It is a very useful tool in identifying problems that may prevent a Bruinlearn site from complying with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA, and meeting accessibility standards mandated by the Federal Government.
Getting Started
If the Ally Course Accessibility Report tab is not already a part of your page’s course navigation (i.e. you cannot find it in the list of links on the left-hand side of the screen with “Home” and “Syllabus” etc.) you’ll need to add it.
Go to the “Settings” page of your course and select the “Navigation” tab.
Find the box marked “Ally Course Accessibility Report” and click on the three dots on the right. Select “+ Enable” and the feature will be added to your course site.
Be sure to click the blue “Save” button at the bottom.
You should now see “Ally Course Accessibility Report” in the course navigation section of your page. Clicking it will bring up a dashboard with an Accessibility Report generated for the Bruinlearn site.
How to Read and Use this Dashboard
Course Accessibility Score: At the top of the dashboard you will see the course’s accessibility score. This gives you a snapshot overview of how accessible the site is as a whole. As you fix accessibility issues with the site this score will increase.
Course Content: Underneath the Course Accessibility Score to the left is a breakdown of the content which makes up the Bruinlearn site. The distribution of course content type is displayed in a pie chart, along with the number of each type. Clicking the “View” button will bring up a list of all of the site’s course content items, along with their individual Accessibility Scores and the number of issues each item has that require remediation. Each item’s accessibility score also has a small visual icon indicating the severity of its accessibility issues (Red = Severe accessibility issues; Orange = Accessibility issues require attention; Light Green = Mostly accessible; Dark Green = No accessibility issues).
Note: As you navigate your Bruinlearn site normally these indicators will appear next to images and files there to let you know the extent of the content’s accessibility.
Content Accessibility Quickstart: To the right of the Course Content are two tools that will help you dive right in and identify and fix specific accessibility issues with your site. The top box contains the number of content items on the site with easy to fix issues, while the bottom box displays the number of items that have a low accessibility score (meaning they present greater challenges to users’ accessibility, and likely require more attention and work to fix). Clicking the “Start” button on either of these boxes will bring up a list of the specific items within that category which require remediation.
Remaining Issues: At the bottom of the dashboard is a list of accessibility issues found on the site with a count of how many content items are affected by this issue. Clicking on any one of these issues will bring up a list of the individual content items that have this accessibility issue.
Fixing Issues
By clicking on an individual content item you will be taken to a new page where you can review it and see more about exactly why it was flagged and what is required to make it more accessible and in compliance with the WCAG 2.1 guidelines. On the right-hand side of the screen, you should see an accessibility score for that content item, a description of what the issue is with that item, and suggestions on how to fix it. Some issues can be fixed directly within the Ally Course Accessibility Report. For instance, you can fix content with the issue “The image does not have a description” / “The image is missing a description” by simply clicking on the content item to review it and providing a description of the image in the appropriate text field (in this case, there is also a button to have AI auto-generate a description, but be sure to check the results!):
Note: It is best practice to find the files which need to be fixed on your Bruinlearn page and remediate them there, or fix them in their source program (Powerpoint, Adobe, etc.,) and replace them on your site, rather than use the Ally Course Accessibility Report. This is because changes made to your site using this tool don’t actually change the file itself, but applies a layer instead.
Other issues are not easily fixed with the Ally Course Accessibility Report and may require files to be remediated and replaced. For instance, PDF documents that have not been run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) cannot be read by a screen reader and are not accessible. While the Ally Course Accessibility Report does have a feature which will OCR the text for you, we recommend using our new AI PDF remediation tool Luna (LINK TO LUNA ARTICLE) to make a new, accessible version of the document and replacing the old one instead.
The most common accessibility issues in Bruinlearn across the Humanities are:
Undeclared document language (~62K)
Missing image descriptions (~54K)
Untagged PDFs (~54K)
Low contrast in documents (~45K)
Missing document titles (~40K).
Accessibility Scores
If you have questions about making content on your Bruinlearn site accessible, feel free to reach out to Humtech’s Research & Instructional Technology Consultants (ritc@humnet.ucla.edu) or the Center for Accessible Education (https://cae.ucla.edu/contact/contact-us).