How to Read your BruinLearn site’s Ally Course Accessibility Report

BruinLearn

Ally Course Accessibility Report

The Ally Course Accessibility Report can be used to review your BruinLearn site for accessibility issues and provide suggestions on how to fix them. It helps identify problems that may prevent a site from complying with WCAG 2.1 Level AA and meeting federally mandated accessibility standards.

Getting Started

If the Ally Course Accessibility Report is not already in your course navigation, you’ll need to add it:

  1. Go to the Settings page of your course and select the Navigation tab.
  2. Find Ally Course Accessibility Report, click the three dots on the right, and select + Enable.
  3. Click the blue Save button at the bottom.

You should now see “Ally Course Accessibility Report” in your course navigation. Clicking it will open a dashboard with an accessibility report for your site.

How to Read the Dashboard

Course Accessibility Score

At the top of the dashboard is a snapshot of how accessible your site is overall. This score increases as you fix issues.

Course Content

A pie chart shows the distribution of content types on your site. Click View to see a full list of content items, each with an individual accessibility score and issue count. Score icons indicate severity:

  • Red – Severe accessibility issues
  • Orange – Issues require attention
  • Light Green – Mostly accessible
  • Dark Green – No accessibility issues

These indicators also appear next to images and files as you browse your BruinLearn site normally.

Content Accessibility Quickstart

Two quick-access panels appear to the right of the pie chart. One shows items with easy-to-fix issues; the other shows items with low accessibility scores requiring more attention. Click Start on either to see the specific items that need work.

Remaining Issues

At the bottom of the dashboard is a list of accessibility issues and how many content items are affected by each. Click any issue to see the specific items flagged for that problem.

Fixing Issues

Clicking an individual content item takes you to a detail page showing the accessibility score, a description of the issue, and suggestions for fixing it. Some issues can be resolved directly in the Ally tool — for example, missing image descriptions can be added by typing in a text field (an AI auto-generate button is available, but always review the results).

Best practice: Fix files directly on your BruinLearn page or in their source program (PowerPoint, Adobe, etc.) and replace them on your site. Changes made through Ally apply an accessibility layer rather than modifying the original file.

Some issues — such as untagged PDFs that haven’t been run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) — cannot be read by screen readers and require more involved remediation. While Ally includes an OCR feature, we recommend using the AI PDF remediation tool Luna to create a new accessible version of the document and replace the old one.

Most Common Accessibility Issues in BruinLearn

Across the Humanities, the most frequent issues found are:

  • Undeclared document language (~62K items)
  • Missing image descriptions (~54K items)
  • Untagged PDFs (~54K items)
  • Low contrast in documents (~45K items)
  • Missing document titles (~40K items)

Questions?

If you have questions about making content on your BruinLearn site accessible, reach out to: