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Universal design...

Blackboard Ally - for students

Norsk versjon: Blackboard Ally - for studenter

Blackboard Ally is a tool that controls and contributes to Universal Design of teaching materials.

Blackboard Ally makes it easier to improve accessibility in teaching materials and lets students take control over the content in their subjects themselves. Students can use Blackboard Ally to download content in filetypes that suit their needs.  

A boy looking at his PC-screen while smiling. Around him are logos of different filetypes. In the bottom of the picture, there is text saying Blackboard Ally.

Alternative formats available i Ally 

Students can download all files from their teachers. These can be downloaded in different formats. For instance, presentations can be downloaded as audio files where all text from the original file is read to them. 

 You can download alternative formats of these filetypes: 

  • PDF 
  • Microsoft Word  
  • Microsoft PowerPoint  
  • OpenOffice  
  • HTML  

At the moment you can only download teaching materials in alternative formats, which means that this solution is not yet available for student content like submitted papers. 

How to download alternative formats?  

To download files from Blackboard in alternative formats, you press the Ally-logo, which looks like the letter A, placed behind the name of the file in question. Then a window will appear, showing the alternative file types. Choose your preferred format and press “Download”. 

The symbol of a text file and the title Infoskriv. Behind the name is the Ally-logo with a blue circle around it.

The alternative formats you can download are: 

  • PDF – Scanned, searchable and with reduces file size.  
  • Tagged PDF – Customized for usage of assistive technology  
  • Audio file – MP3  
  • HTML – Customized view in the web browser 
  • Electronic Braille – For reading on electronic braille displays 
  • ePub – For viewing and noting in e-book-reading 
  • Beeline – Version for faster and focused screen-reading  

A screen shot of the list of filetypes that appear is you press the alternative formats-button in Blackboard Ally.

Do you want to know more?