Accessibility Allies at the University of Southampton

Introduction

The University of Southampton introduced Blackboard Ally (a tool that provides insight into an institution's accessibility) in Summer 2021. To support the rollout, five student interns were employed over the summer as “Accessibility Allies”.

In this webinar, the University's Digital Learning Team shared how they organised the project and provided information about the work undertaken by the students and outlined how they achieved impressive results.

Students were involved with remediating course content to make it more digitally accessible, and advised academic staff about how to improve accessibility, among other things. Their work resulted in an average 87% increase in course file accessibility score, benefiting more than 6,000 students.

Resources

We compiled and shared as many assets as possible so that others may build upon our work. The slides are also available. Content is hosted on the Digital Learning website.