This is a petition from the Disabled Students Collective (DSC) at The George Washington University to make Blackboard Ally, an accessibility tool, mandatory for Professors to enable on all Blackboard courses.

Blackboard Ally helps improve the accessibility of course material uploaded to the course on the Blackboard course platform. The application reviews uploaded materials and scores these materials on their accessibility and provides strategies to improve their accessibility, which is based on WCAG 2.1 AA (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), an international accessibility standard. Blackboard Ally also provides alternative formats for content uploaded to the course, allowing students to download course materials in a way that suits their accessibility needs. Enabling Blackboard Ally benefits all students and reduces the time that disabled students spend on waiting for course materials to be converted through the Disability Support Services office or through the professor. Essentially, Blackboard Ally promotes academic success for all students.

Without Blackboard Ally, students have to spend hours to complete homework assignments and readings that could be made easily accessible. For example, a member of the DSC E-board is dependent on audio transcriptions of assignments as she is blind. “[Without Blackboard Ally] I have to rely wholly on DSS and have meetings with my professors every week for simple questions that I missed in the readings… Without it, professors are allowing their audio dependent students to fail. That’s a very blunt statement, but because I am blind if I don’t have an audio file for a book I have to rely on a human reader and schedule my homework time around another person. I wouldn’t be able to do my homework and exams on my own without Blackboard Ally,” she said.

Overall, with this petition GW administration will learn that Blackboard Ally is a necessary tool that improves the quality of education for every student at GW and would make our university a more accessible university. Sign the petition now and support the academic success of disabled students!

Check out the library website for more details on Blackboard Ally