Common Teaching Scenarios

You open bCourses, click on Ally, and discover that many of your PDFs have very low scores, sometimes as low as 0%.  You may be thinking: “I have 90 documents flagged…”, “I can’t possibly fix all of this.” If this is your experience, you are not alone! This is one of the first reactions when instructors use Ally for the first time. 

The key is not to treat Ally as a grade or critique of your course materials, but as a guide that helps you identify and prioritize accessibility improvements. 

What Low Ally Scores on PDFs Usually Mean? 

In most cases, very low scores on PDFs indicate one of the following: 

• The file is image-based -that is, it’s like a photograph of the content (rather than the content itself), a scanned document without selectable or searchable text.

• The document lacks a heading structure. 

• Images inside the file do not have an alternative description.

So, a low score means the file was not created with accessibility structure in place. 

The Workflow

• Identify core readings that are essential and will definitely be used in the course.

• For these, check whether accessible library versions are available and replace the scans with those.

• If the content is instructor-created, consider using the original source file (e.g., Word, Google Doc, etc.) or bCourses Pages instead of a PDF version. To ensure your original documents are accessible, see the RTL resources for Accessible Documents (Microsoft Word & Google Docs), Accessible Slides (Microsoft PowerPoint & Google Slides), and Accessible bCourses Content

• If replacement or source files are not available

• For image-based scans, run the document through SensusAccess to OCR and tag it.

• Focus on what students will use in the first few weeks and set a routine; build an accessibility workflow aligned with what you release to students.

• Temporarily remove or restrict access to materials that are not currently being used. In bCourses, you can unpublish files while you work on making them accessible. 

• Let students know you are actively working on improving accessibility and invite them to flag materials that are not accessible.

Your slides might contain dozens of images. When you hear about alt text for images, you might be thinking: “Am I supposed to write descriptions for every image in this deck?”

Not necessarily. The goal of alt text is not to describe every detail of an image, but to make the visual's meaning accessible to all students.Alt text is a short description embedded behind an image. Screen readers and other assistive technologies use this text to convey the content of the visual. If the image fails to load, the alt text may also appear in its place so the information is still available.

The Workflow

Ask:

• Does this image need a description at all? Some images are purely decorative; for example, a banner image or a stock photo of a campus building at the top of a syllabus. If that is the case, you can simply right-click the image, select Alt Text, and check “Mark as decorative,” or remove the image altogether.

• Is the same information on the image already written on the slide or explained in nearby text? If the visual repeats information already available in the text, it can often be marked as decorative. 

• Does the image introduce new meaning or information? If the visual contributes to students' understanding of the lesson and is not decorative, it does need alt text. In that case: 

• Keep the alt text concise: Screen readers cannot easily "pause" or "rewind" alt text, so brevity is really helpful. Aim for one to two short sentences (~125 characters or less) describing the key idea or takeaway from the image.

• Context is everything: Describe the visual based on why it is in your lesson. A photo of the Golden Gate Bridge in an engineering course might require a very different description than the exact same photo in a photography course.

• Start with the content itself, rather than phrases like “image of”: Screen readers already announce that the element is an image. 

• Avoid repeating text that already appears in captions or surrounding text. 

• Is your image a complex chart or diagram? Use alt text to convey the graphic's overall pattern, structure, or trend. If the visual contains detailed data, include the full explanation elsewhere in the surrounding text or in notes.

• Is your image an equation or a mathematical expression? When possible, create equations using tools that produce machine-readable math, such as the bCourses Equation Editor, which converts LaTeX into MathML. 

• Do you have too many images that need alt texts? Use AI tools like Gemini to generate first drafts. Save your slides as a PDF, upload them to Gemini, and use this prompt: "Analyze the attached file and create a table listing every image and stock photo found (do not group them). Create a table with these columns: Page Number, Visual Reference, Alt Text (Provide a concise sentence describing the image's core meaning or data trend). Make sure to verify the output before inserting it into your document, as AI can make mistakes.Note: To protect sensitive data, always sign in to your bConnected suite with your CalNet account to use Gemini. This ensures your content is not used to train external models.

The copy button in bCourses is a lifesaver, but over time, courses accumulate old readings that got replaced but never removed, three versions of the same slide deck, a folder of files from a colleague who taught this course before you. When you open your Ally report, it can feel like opening a closet you haven't touched in years! 

That sense of "where do I even begin" is one of the most common things we hear from instructors. And the answer isn't to start at the top of the list that Ally gives you and work your way down. It's to get strategic about what actually needs your attention. 

Your Ally report is a good place to start, but it helps to know what you're actually looking at before you do anything with it.

What Ally Is Really Showing You

Ally scans everything in your course, including files that are unpublished, buried in folders, or haven't been touched in years. So when your report looks alarming, it's often because it's reflecting the full history of the course, not just what your students are able to see. That's an important distinction. A file students can't see and aren't being asked to use is a lower priority than the syllabus you publish on the first day of class.

The Workflow

Depending on where you are in the process, we suggest two workflows:

I already copied my course and I selected “All content” when doing it

• Start with a sweep, not a fix. Before touching a file, go through your Files section and remove anything that won’t be actively used in your future course – old versions, unused readings, files left over from a previous iteration of the course. This alone can change how your Ally report looks, and it takes far less time than remediating files you weren't going to use anyway.

• Then ask: what will students actually use? Pull up your current modules and look at what's assigned. Rather than trying to fix the whole course at once before it starts, address accessibility for materials as you go through the semester andelease them to students. Ask yourself: "what am I publishing in the first two weeks?" Start there and work through the semester week by week.

• For files you have the originals of: Your own slides, handouts, syllabus, etc. Go back to the source document and make fixes there before re-exporting. It's almost always faster than working on the PDF directly. See RTL's guidance on Accessible Documents and Accessible Slides for where to start.

• For files you don't have originals for: Inherited readings, scanned articles, a colleague's old handouts. Check the Library first to see if you can replace it with a direct permalink. If nothing's available there, SensusAccess can convert scanned image-based PDFs into something a screen reader can actually work with.

• Let students know you're working on it. A brief note in your syllabus or a course announcement invites students to flag issues rather than quietly struggling. Something like: "I am actively reviewing and improving the accessibility of course materials. If you encounter a file that is difficult to access, please let me know and I'll prioritize it." 

I haven't copied my course yet, or I'm about to

This is a great moment to be intentional. When bCourses gives you the option, choose "Select specific content" instead of "All content." Rather than copying everything forward, cherry-pick only what you actually plan to use this semester. It takes a little more time up front but saves a lot of cleanup later.

• Be selective about what you bring forward. Go through your previous course files and ask: is this still the right resource for my students? Is this reading still relevant? Is this version of the slide deck the most current one? Only copy what you know students will need.

• Share files in their original format when you can. When examining which materials to copy forward, consider sharing the Word documents and Google Docs versions directly rather than exporting them to PDF. PDFs exported from source files can lose accessibility structure in the process, and fixing a PDF is almost always harder than fixing the original. If you do need to share a PDF, always export using File → Save As rather than Print to PDF, which strips out all accessibility structure. We know some instructors convert to PDF to protect materials from being edited or redistributed, but a bCourses page or a view or read-only Word doc or Google Doc link gives you similar protection while staying accessible.

• Build accessibility in as you go. For any new materials you're creating for this semester, start with accessibility in mind rather than treating it as a fix-up task at the end. See RTL's guidance on Accessible Documents, Accessible Slides, and Accessible bCourses Sites for practical starting points.

• Let students know they can flag issues. Even a carefully curated course will have things that slip through. A brief note in your syllabus like "If you encounter a file that is difficult to access, please let me know" gives students a way to reach you without requiring everything to be perfect from day one.