In line with the Digital Accessibility Policy, the Digital Accessibility Team produces reports of the most frequent accessibility issues found in courses across the breadth of each department and faculty on a termly basis, as well as at the start of the academic year. These reports are provided at several levels of detail, and have been designed with faculty and departmental support, and in collaboration with the HEDS Faculty Partnership Team.
These reports intend to highlight trends in issues, and aim to raise awareness and encourage strategies for long-term improvement. Please consider the suggested issues as key things to focus on to achieve necessary improvements in overall performance as part of a consistent collective approach, and key things to be vigilant for when developing new content or staff training, and when designing templates.
About the Ally reports
The data itself is produced by a tool embedded into Moodle called Anthology (formerly Blackboard) Ally, which analyses uploaded content for accessibility issues and computes accessibility scores at the levels of individual content, course, department, and faculty. Our reports use this data to highlight the top issues for each department and faculty to focus on, based on the findings for the courses within, but we do not generate this data ourselves.
Ally generates three scores:
- A files score (for uploaded content, e.g. Word documents, images, PowerPoint presentations, and PDFs)
- A WYSIWYG score (for content created in Moodle’s own editor)
- An overall score (a weighted average of the two aforementioned scores)
Since many of the issues relating to WYSIWYG content are minor, and dependent on the underlying accessibility of Moodle itself or the specific layout the course is using, we have chosen to report only the files score – as “documents accessibility score” for clarity – at department and faculty level.
Versions of the reports before 2024-25 Term 1 took only frequency of each accessibility issue into account, but versions from 2024-25 Term 1 onwards account for severity of issue and then frequency, as remediating more severe issues has a greater impact on improving a course’s overall accessibility score.
Please see our guidance on creating accessible content for more information on remediating uploaded files. PDFs are particularly difficult to remediate, and should be replaced or supplemented with the original source files in e.g. Word or plaintext format as best practice, or alternatively supplemented with a converted HTML version, as advised in the Digital Accessibility Policy.
Feedback
The reports are works in progress, and feedback is welcome!
Please do note though that we cannot control what Ally itself analyses, and we cannot change how the course accessibility reports within Moodle work. Feedback on and queries about Moodle should be directed to the Moodle team, and feedback on and queries about Ally should be directed to UCL’s Ally representative (contact details to be added soon).
We are aware of the following issues:
- Ally is an automated tool and cannot intuit the intent behind documents, so it may flag documents as inaccessible when they are not, or vice versa; we cannot control how Ally detects or interprets issues, so please use your best judgement when remediating your content
- Legacy files within courses are still being considered within Ally’s analysis; this is not a false positive, and legacy files must be manually deleted from course file repositories in order to be removed from consideration. Guidance on course housekeeping will be linked here when available, but in the meantime please take note of any legacy files flagged for remediation and otherwise skip them
- There are delays when courses have been rolled over to a new academic year before Ally begins to analyse them, so the reports produced at the start of the academic year may not account for all courses
- There are also delays for Ally to update the scores following edits to content
- Ally does not start analysis of courses categorised as being for “future” academic years until those years become “present”, so creating a course early for the next academic year will not enable you to see its accessibility report in advance
- Links in the reports do not open correctly within the SharePoint HTML viewer, so if viewing a report on SharePoint, please open all links to e.g. UCL guidance in a new tab (Ctrl+Click)