The Blackboard Accessibility Dashboard is designed to give stakeholders a high-level view of the digital accessibility of content uploaded to Blackboard.
Accessing the Blackboard Accessibility Dashboard
The Blackboard Accessibility Dashboard is available through PowerBI.
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Current status
This dashboard is currently considered a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This means that it has just enough features to be usable for early stakeholders who can help us to identify faults and improvements. Keep this concept in mind when using this dashboard.
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What data is included?
The report covers modules in Blackboard which:
- Have a "term" of the current or past three academic years, or have a specific term requested by Medicine to differentiate some of their modules such as those within Bachelor of Medicine 4 years (BM4) and so on.
- "Terms" are a feature in Blackboard that allow modules to be grouped together.
- This means modules that appear in Blackboard under "Current Courses" with a recent year code are included, but modules with other terms such as "sandbox" or "programme information" are not.
- Are associated with a faculty, school, or department in Blackboard.
This means that the report does not cover the entirety of our Blackboard usage, but it does cover the most important majority of mainstream Blackboard usage at University of Southampton.
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How old is the data?
In the initial Summary page, you can view when the data was last refreshed and when it was last modified.
- Last modified is most important, it tells us the time at which the data was extracted from Blackboard.
- Last refreshed tells us when the extracted data was inserted into the PowerBI report.
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How can data be filtered?
Reporting can be filtered using slicers that allow the information to be broken down by:
- Academic term: limits the data to modules delivered in an academic year.
- Organisational level: set reporting to be at faculty, school, or department level. It’s important to verify this setting when making further changes.
- Faculty / School / Department: set reporting to focus on certain faculties, schools, or departments.
- Blackboard course id: search for a specific Blackboard course identifier, such as UOSM2004-34102-24-25
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What does the report cover?
The report has three pages: summary, accessibility issues, and content usage.
Summary
The summary provides a general overview of the accessibility status of modules within the selection criteria chosen using the slicers.
Summary: top section
The top section of the summary includes a number of "headline" insights.
- Percentage-based accessibility scores for:
- Files uploaded to Blackboard (File Score)
- Content created within Blackboard such as announcements and content descriptions (WYSIWYG Score)
- Overall accessibility Score (a combination of the WYSIWYG Score and the File Score).
- Number of student enrolments.
- Total number of accessibility issues.
Summary: middle section
The middle section breaks down issues by their severity.
Donut charts show the prevalence of severe, major and minor issues broken down by the grouping set using the organisational level slicer. Below each donut chart, the data is displayed in tabular format.
Severe issues have the biggest impact on accessibility scores. Examples of severe issues include:
- automatically playing animations that may trigger seizures.
- scanned documents that are not readable by assistive technologies.
Resources with severe accessibility issues are unlikely to transform effectively when students request alternative formats from Blackboard.
Major issues affect the usefulness of Blackboard’s alternative formats and present significant barriers to students who rely on assistive technology.
Examples of major issues include:
- missing alternative text.
- poor colour contrast.
- a lack of headings to structure resources.
Minor issues have less of an effect on the accessibility score but can still present meaningful barriers to students with impairments or disabilities.
Examples of minor issues include:
- poor use of headings to structure resources.
office documents that do not have a title.
- failing to specify the language in which a document is written.
Summary: bottom section
A set of bar charts in the bottom row compares the number of severe, major and minor issues by the grouping set using the organisational level slicer.
Accessibility Issues
The accessibility issues page offers a deeper insight into the prevalence of types of accessibility issue, in relation to number of enrolments, number of resources, and the number of issues.
Accessibility Issues: top section
The row of buttons allows you to choose which type of accessibility issues you wish to analyse:
- Alternative text issues are when alternative text is not provided for images. This presents a barrier to those who do not see the image and for those who use Blackboard’s audio alternative format to listen to content.
- Contrast issues are when content is presented in colours with low contrast, making it difficult to read.
- Scanned content issues are when scanned content is shared that is not "machine readable". This means that students
- cannot copy and paste extracts.
- cannot transform the content into one of Blackboard’s alternative formats.
- who use assistive technologies may be unable to read the content.
- Structure issues covers a variety of issues where content is missing helpful features such as document headings, table headings, or setting the document language.
When you select a button, the overall title of the Y axis in the bubble chart below reflects to state the type of issue you have chosen.
Accessibility Issues: middle section
The "Accessibility Issues by Type" bubble chart helps to identify how University faculties, schools, and departments compare in terms of their Blackboard resources experiencing different types of accessibility issue.
- The X axis has the number of resources. Some groups have more resources than others.
- The Y axis is the total number of issues within the chosen set.
- You may change the scale of the X and Y axis using the zoom sliders.
- A dotted line shows the university average.
- The size of the bubble represents the number of student enrolments on Blackboard modules belonging to the organisational unit.
- The position of the bubble reflects where that organisational unit is in terms of the number of resources it has in Blackboard and the number of issues.
The same data is shown below the bubble charts in tabular format.
Accessibility Issues: bottom section
Within the bottom row is a stacked bar chart. Each selected organisational unit presented in the X axis. The Y axis shows the total number of issues. The stack is made up of the number of issues of each type:
- Alternative text issues
- Contrast issues
- Scanned content issues
- Structure issues
The same data is shown below the stacked bar chart in tabular format.
Content Usage
The content usage page sets out the type of content instructors are using in their Blackboard modules.
The set of buttons set which type of content to report on:
- Documents are files such as Word documents.
- HTML pages are when web content has been uploaded in HTML format to Blackboard, or when we use the "Add HTML" feature, for example to embed web content from other sources.
- Images are image files, mainly jpeg, png, and gif file types.
- Other is any other file type.
- PDF is Adobe PDF files.
- Presentations are files such as PowerPoint presentations.
- WYSIWYG means What You See Is What You Get content and refers to content such as announcements and content descriptions typed directly into Blackboard rather than separate files created elsewhere and uploaded into Blackboard.
The bar graphs show content usage by volume in the selected organisational units in descending order.
Below the bar graphs, a table summarises a full breakdown of types of content used across the whole University in Blackboard, broken down by content type and faculty, school, and department.
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Keyboard navigation tips
For those who use the keyboard to navigate the screen please be aware:
- Standard keyboard controls using tab, enter, space, and cursor keys work in the ways you expect.
- Due to the complexity of PowerBI reports, further commands are available that may be new to you.
- Across PowerBI reports
- Move focus between sections: Ctrl + F6
- Move focus backwards between sections: Ctrl + Shift + F6
- Show visuals as tables: Ctrl + Shift + F11
- Show keyboard shortcuts: ?
- Enter a visual or layer: Enter
- Exit a layer or visual: Esc
- When interacting with visual components such as graphs
- Move focus to visual menu: Alt + Shift + F10
- Show as a table: Alt + Shift + F11
Read further information about Keyboard Shortcuts in PowerBI (Microsoft web page).
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Screen reader navigation tips
- Open your screen reader before opening the Blackboard Accessibility Dashboard.
- Use Focus Mode if your screen reader offers this functionality.
- All graphical summaries of data are also available in tabular format, which will be simpler to parse using a screen reader.
- As well as the standard screen reader shortcuts, the keyboard shortcuts above will also prove helpful to navigate the Blackboard Accessibility Dashboard.
Read further information about Using Screen Readers with PowerBI (Microsoft web page).
The following lists of screen reader keyboard shortcuts may also be useful:
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