On Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2025, the Course Accessibility Checker widget was added to the Course Homepage in Brightspace. The widget uses the current Brightspace accessibility tool, Anthology Ally, to provide instructors with feedback to improve course content accessibility. This tool is only visible to course instructors.
The primary goal of improving course accessibility is to ensure SUNY Oswego is in compliance with the new enforcement of Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which has an April 24, 2026 deadline. However, proactively removing barriers for students with disabilities also makes content more usable for all learners.
Key features for faculty
The widget serves two main functions for faculty:
- Displays the course’s overall Ally score.
- Provides a direct link to the Full Accessibility Report.
The Full Accessibility Report offers a comprehensive dashboard that is designed to help faculty prioritize remediation efforts. This report includes:
- A breakdown of content by type (e.g., PDFs, Word documents, or images)
- Identification of content with the most severe issues
- Highlighting items that are easiest to fix
Guided remediation
The report's true power lies in its ability to offer guided, step-by-step instructions for fixing accessibility problems. For instance, the report can:
- Direct an instructor to a low-scoring PDF and provide steps to ensure it has proper structure and is machine-readable.
- Point out images missing alternative text.
- Identify videos without captions.
-- Submitted by Campus Technology Services