Blackboard Ally is a tool to help make your course content more accessible. It creates alternative formats of your course files to suit your needs. These files include readable text for screen readers, pictures with captions, and easy-to-navigate content. Ally creates these alternatives from the original documents available in your course. You can download the alternative formats anywhere that files are used.
To get an alternative accessible format of your course file, find the course file, click the “Accessible versions” option, and select your desired alternative format and download it to your computer.Ally generates alternative formats for these file types:
- Word
- PowerPoint
- OpenOffice/LibreOffice
- HTML
and creates these alternative accessible formats:
- OCR version for scanned documents
- Tagged PDF version of Word, PowerPoint, and OpenOffice/LibreOffice
- ePub
- Electronic braille
- Audio file
- Translations for 25 languages/voices
After selecting an accessible version and clicking the Download button, the Preparing Download notification appears. The download may take multiple minutes to complete.
After the file downloads, you can open or save the alternative version. You can also return to the original file and download the other formats. The original file that your instructor has provided will always remain in the course, regardless of which alternative format you select.
When you download and save the alternative format, you would open that file on your computer. It will not automatically display in your browser.