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Document Accessibility Analysis (like the WebAIM Million but for documents)

for

From: Krista Greear
Date: Oct 11, 2021 7:56PM

Hi Elizabeth and the WebAIM list,

I'm responding to you as a Senior Accessibility Strategist at Blackboard. I
wanted to be transparent in case if seemed like I come off sales-y. That's
not my intention.

Loved your question. While there's nothing quite as formal as WebAIM's
report, Blackboard Ally
<https://www.blackboard.com/teaching-learning/accessibility-universal-design/blackboard-ally-lms>
scans content (namely documents) within the LMS in higher education (and
some business and government agencies). Ally scans PDFs, Word Docs and
PowerPoints for over dozens of accessibility issues
<https://help.blackboard.com/Ally/Ally_for_LMS/Administrator/Institution_Report/Accessibility_Checklist>.
We've been doing this for over 4 years and have shared public-facing data
about this at Ally Research <https://ally.ac/research> and the Book of Ally
<https://go.blackboard.com/book-of-ally> (definitely download the free book
for the most comprehensive 1-stop solution).

Since Ally launched, we have scanned over 2.5 billion course items (yes,
billion) and processed 70 million courses. To my knowledge, I don't know of
a comparable tool that offers similar data. I can say with extreme
confidence that the most prevalence accessibility issues (by quantity) in
documents within higher education are as follows:

- Documents with color contrast issues
- Images in LMS missing alt text
- Documents with images missing alt text
- Documents missing headings
- Untagged PDFs

This is now outdated, but my previous colleague John Scott spoke to some of
the document accessibility trends at Accessing Higher Ground back in Nov
2019. See Global Portraits of Inclusion: An Ethnographic Account Of
Accessibility in Education
<https://accessinghigherground.org/global-portraits-of-inclusion-an-ethnographic-account-of-accessibility-in-education/>,
the second Ally_AHG_2019
<https://accessinghigherground.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Ally_AHG_2019-1.pptx>
link
at the bottom of the page for the slide deck with more data comparing
certain metrics from 2017 to 2019. This slide deck is publicly available.

And if I may add as Vice President of ATHEN <https://athenpro.org/>, our
industry definitely needs more data, research, trends, etc. into document
accessibility. The industry is sorely lacking and there is prime
opportunity for interested parties to produce good information to help us
all move forward.

Best,
Krista

--
Krista Greear
Accessibility and Inclusivity Crusader
ATHEN Executive Council Vice President
Access Technology Higher Education Network <https://athenpro.org/>

On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 9:46 AM Elizabeth Thomas < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
wrote:

> Does anyone know of a large-scale document accessibility analysis?
> Something like the WebAIM Million <https://webaim.org/projects/million/>,
> but for documents? So maybe an analysis of the top (insert any number here)
> most downloaded documents. Download the documents, run them through an
> automated checker, and log the issues in some sort of database (or even a
> simple Excel worksheet).
>
> Does that exist? Is anyone working on something like this right now? If
> not, I think I found my next side project...
>
> -Elizabeth Thomas
> CPACC, ADA
>
>