For many years, colleges and universities have observed the Americans with Disabilities Act by finding alternate ways for students with disabilities to meet course requirements. For example, a blind student might be accommodated by allowing a university representative to orally read the student questions from a written exam. A student with limited mobility might be allowed some extra time in getting from one class to another. More recently, many universities have expanded accommodations to cover conditions that might have been ignored in the recent past: today, students who can document Attention Deficit Disorder are routinely offered extra time in taking exams.
One example of the rapidly changing institutional culture regarding students with disabilities is a new service provided by Blackboard, which is perhaps the most common software platform in American colleges for delivering course content. Through Blackboard, professors post required readings and assignments, grade student work, and even facilitate online discussions among members of the class. This fall, the university at which I teach implemented an additional service offered by Blackboard that is called “Ally.” Blackboard Ally is a tool built into the software that alerts the professor in the case that any material posted for the course may be less than perfectly “accessible” for students. Next to each document posted for the course, a small gauge or dial is shown: colored green, yellow, or red, the software judges the “accessibility” of each file. I post mostly Microsoft Word documents and .pdf files for my courses: sometimes these would be deemed green, sometimes red. As I don't have the technical knowledge to know which disability my Word files are disadvantaging (or the time or knowledge to make them more “accessible”) I generally ignore the feedback from Blackboard Ally.
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