Alternative Formats Ally provides an accessibility report on critical issues in your Moodle course. This report has a more detailed view of what issues you may need to fix and offers the opportunity to do so directly from the screen. This report will provide a starting point when you are evaluating how well your course meets accessibility regulations (a legal requirement).
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Who can access the Accessibility Report?
If you are an editing teacher on a Moodle course (a Module Leader or co-teacher) in the Navigation Tray (opened using the pink ‘hamburger’ icon in the top left corner) near the bottom there is an ‘Accessibility Report’ button. Clicking on this will pull up the full report for the whole module.
What should I do with the information on the report?
Use the Accessibility Report from Alternative Formats Ally to solve critical accessibility issues in your Moodle courses. While the report is not comprehensive the most common errors, such as missing alternative text on images, are flagged. Most fixes can be applied directly on the Report itself. If the fix needs to be applied on Moodle rather than on the Report, clicking on the links will take you to the relevant section on the course.
How do I read the Accessibility Report?
In addition to a colourful overview of the course content there are two main sections to the Accessibility Report.
- The Overview tab shows the accessibility score for the course, course content grouped by content type, and a list of all issues identified in the course
- The Content tab shows you the content with accessibility issues.
The files that Alternative Formats Ally currently checks will be represented in the report and suggested fixes will be offered. Any other files will be listed as ‘Other’.
In the report, the most severe issues will be listed first and minor issues will be listed last. These issues are grouped by type. Clicking on the type of issue, such as ‘The Document contains images without a description’ will pull up all of the files and resources that contain that same issue for you to view at once. As you fix issues, you will be able to see your Accessibility Score increase by each percentage point.
What does Alternative Formats Ally check in Moodle besides uploaded files and folders?
Some crucial activities and resources that Alternative Formats Ally checks are:
- Moodle Assignments
- Moodle Books and Book Chapters
- Forum Discussion Descriptions and Topics
- Glossary Descriptions and Entries
- Labels
- Page Introductions and Content
The file types Alternative Formats Ally currently checks are:
- PDF files
- Microsoft Word document
- Microsoft PowerPoint presentations
- OpenOffice/LibreOffice files
- Uploaded HTML files
- Image files (JPG, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF)
- WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) content (i.e. any text and other information added to the Atto editor or text boxes).
- Embedded Youtube Videos
What do I fix first?
There are two methods to choose from when you start applying fixes. You can either choose to fix the most severe issues first (listed as Fix low scoring content), or the ones that are fastest to apply (listed as Content with the easiest issues to fix). Decide how you would like to proceed and click Start to begin.
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The fastest fixes to apply that will produce the most impactful results are to apply alternative text descriptions to all images and replace scanned PDFs with a transformable file type.
- For images, you will be given the option to add a description or mark decorative images as ‘decorative’ from the report feedback if relevant.
- For scanned PDFs (i.e. ones that cannot be read by a screenreader) you should replace these with a different file type that can be read by a screenreader (such as a tagged PDF, Word Document, or PowerPoint presentation).