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When a student provides you with a letter of accommodation that includes an accommodation for alternate format. This need can be met proactively by ensuring that course materials such as syllabus, hand-outs, textbooks, and supplements meet digital accessibility guidelines. For more information about creating and sourcing accessible materials, visit accessibility.uic.edu.
You can help facilitate the process of making your course material accessible by working closely with the alternate format team (accesstext@uic.edu) when they reach out to you via email in response to a student request for alternate format in your course.
The student should submit the Alternate Format Request Form to start the process to get their course materials convert into an alternate format
**Please note that it may take up to 15 business days to convert course materials depending on the nature of the request.
For all requests: ensure that the student has completed the Alternate Format Request Form.
For textbook conversions: the alternate format team will coordinate textbook conversions using our online resources. This will likely not require any additional steps on the faculty member’s part.
For students who require all course material (course material provided by faculty including articles and/or book chapters) in an alternate format, the DRC Alternate Format team will reach out to faculty when they receive a request via email. Faculty will need to share materials with the Alternate Format team by following the steps below:
**It may take up to 15 business days to convert course materials
Please note:
Thank you for your understanding and cooperation!!
If you need assistance at any point in this process, you can contact us directly at accesstext@uic.edu.
“Alternative formats aren’t just for a select group of students. Alternative formats benefit everyone” (Anthology Inc., 2022).
Ally provides alternative formats for these content types:
These alternative formats can be generated:
Blackboard Ally will generate an accessibility report for each course that provides instructors a metric for accessibility.
The metric includes:
At the top of the report is an accessibility score for the entire course.
Scores range from Low to Perfect. The higher the score the fewer the issues.
Unfortunately, scanned texts are very inaccessible, and create challenges for all students to read and study effectively.
When you come across a scanned PDF, do your best to replace it with a digitally created version.
Blackboard Ally will prompt users to OCR (optical character recognition) scanned texts, but the results will only be as good as the source document
Ally is supported on the same browser as the Learning Management System (LMS) it is accessed from.
Blackboard Ally Quick Start for Instructors
Overview for Instructors of Ally for Learning Management Systems