Community Stories and Case Studies

“Ensure everyone has an action plan to make their practice more accessible and ensure they can easily talk to others about digital accessibility.”

“We have recently created and trialed a series of sensory maps for our campus libraries spaces. We want our learning environment to be as supportive as possible, including for those with disabilities, neurodiverse conditions, and other sensory issues. The maps cover light, sound, smells, temperature, level access, wheelchair accessible seating and other mobility information. We have trialed and refined these maps with engagement from both neurodiverse and disabled staff and students to help shape the look and use of these tools. We are launching the maps to everyone on GAAD 2025 and will be sharing our examples and process on MakingThingsAccessible.com so other universities may learn from our experience.”

“We continue to provide the best training and learning opportunities available for all of our employees and students to see the impact of accessibility in action.”

“One significant initiative I have undertaken to support accessibility at my organisation (University of Leeds) is hosting STEM Accessibility Essentials workshops. These 90-minute, in-person sessions are designed to upskill staff on making math equations and complex graphs more accessible for all students. Each session features demonstrations of techniques and software that academic colleagues can utilise to simplify and accelerate the process of ensuring digital accessibility. The in-person format provides staff with the opportunity to ask questions and engage more deeply with the content, which is crucial given the unique challenges of ensuring accessibility in STEM subjects. By providing this hands-on training, we empower our staff to create more inclusive educational materials, ultimately enhancing the learning experience for all students.”

“I teach integrating accessibility alongside security from the start, making it fundamental to every student's design process."

“In Spring 2025, we launched an email campaign to online and campus faculty, sharing why accessibility matters and tutorials for Ally.”

“I have expanded my “Disability and Accessibility” policy in my syllabus. While I still encourage students to seek out accommodations through our University Student Disability Center, I also acknowledge that there are many factors that impede students from seeking accommodations through ocial oces. Thus, I tell my students that I am happy to provide “unocial accommodations” that will maximize their success. I ask they inform me of these accommodations and tell them that they do not need to disclose anything they do not wish to. Additionally, since many disabilities can flare up during times of stress, I let my students know that they can ask for accommodations anytime during the semester. This helps students feel empowered to take agency of their own educational journey and to build the confidence and skill set to know how to advocate for themselves in the future long after they have left my class.”

Based in Ormskirk in the North West of England, Edge Hill University is dedicated to delivering opportunities for learners of all backgrounds. Currently supporting nearly 18,000 learners—spanning full and part time, undergraduate and graduate programmes—they believe strongly in the transformative power of education, starting in their local community and expanding globally. Such is the diverse coalition of students that populates their varied academic programmes, Edge Hill’s vision is as instructive as it is simple: “To provide every encouragement and every opportunity for our students.”

Providing a Learning Environment that Caters to a Diverse Student Body

Higher education in the United Kingdom, as with many other parts of the world, has placed an increased emphasis on inclusion in recent years. As outlined by Universities UK, “Anyone who would benefit from a university education should have access to one. We want to support . . . inclusive environments where all students enjoy their experience and achieve their study and career goals.”

At Edge Hill University, this involves accommodating the changing demographics of their local area and welcoming new cohorts from overseas. As the number of international students at Edge Hill grows, with particular increases from Africa and Asia, their team has invested heavily in programmes to help all learners feel comfortable in the university’s courses and community.

A Holistic Approach to EdTech and Learning Best Practices

Edge Hill has embraced the breadth of Anthology’s teaching and learning portfolio to develop an inclusive environment for all students.

A Profound Improvement in the Student Experience

All the above initiatives have achieved great results, which when combined, amount to a more engaging learning environment for all of Edge Hill’s 18,000 students.

Anthology thanks Edge Hill University for its ongoing partnership and support of initiatives to make higher education more inclusive and accessible. Their outstanding pre-arrival course was a winner in last year’s Anthology Catalyst Awards, and they have been a vocal advocate for Ally’s annual Fix Your Content Day for many years.

Equality and diversity are a core focus for the University of Glasgow. Students from a broad range of backgrounds study at the institution. This included James McCune Smith, the first African American to be awarded a medical degree, who graduated in 1837 and, more recently, had the James McCune Smith Learning Hub—a world-leading learning and teaching facility—named after him. As Andrew McConnell, information officer at the University of Glasgow, said, “Inclusivity has always been a big part of the university, for literally hundreds of years now.” The University of Glasgow has traveled many roads on this journey towards inclusivity, such as decisively responding to the 2019 Equality and Human Rights Commission report and meeting the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018, which builds on the 2010 Equality Act. In 2019, Glasgow began searching for a solution that would help them respond to the Digital Accessibility Regulations requirements for alternative formats and to assist learning and teaching staff in making their content more digitally accessible.

The University of Glasgow found all of the features they were looking for in Anthology® Ally. “It was so obvious we needed to get this tool,” McConnell stated, “because it would help our academics make their content better and would allow students to easily download content in alternate formats.” Alternate content formats created by Ally have been a huge success at Glasgow, with nearly 50% of their students taking advantage of them. These alternative formats are clearly extremely useful for all students, not just for those with disabilities. As a result, the University of Glasgow has improved the student experience in terms of content accessibility by 17% over the academic year 20-21.

Ally has also helped the institution change the way content is created, making it more accessible every time an instructor creates new course materials. It does this by scoring each course and then identifying any accessibility issues, providing guidance on how to fix them, and showing the reason for the best practice. Through this ongoing feedback and guidance provided by Ally, good practices are promoted among educators to mitigate accessibility barriers and to create an environment of continuously improving content. McConnell noted that “The user interface of Ally for the instructor content checking is really easy to use—and I really appreciate a good user experience!”

It’s not always “no pain, no gain”

Contrary to common belief, an implementation can be very painless and as simple as plug-and-play. “Ally does not need training for people to use it,” explained McConnell. “You just need to know you click on the score button and do what it recommends.” A frictionless Ally implementation helped the University of Glasgow to start improving accessibility in record time. It quickly gained popularity among the colleges and schools and helped the University of Glasgow to achieve their accessibility and inclusion goals in a short amount of time. “There are 7,400 courses that are being scanned now and over 21,000 scanned last year. The actual overall accessibility scores are pretty good,” McConnell shared. “We’re currently sitting at 85% on average across the course content, and we’ve seen an increase again this year in our accessibility score. We’re seeing more and more accessible content.”

Accessibility and inclusion are—and always will be—top priorities for the University of Glasgow. According to McConnell, “We’re on a journey to accessible content that hasn’t entirely been about legislative compliance. It’s been about making better content and improving the student experience. Accessible content is better content.” To that end, Ally is the right partner on the road. “We’ve had such a positive experience, so just start from where you are and take the first step. It’s really about starting this journey and heading towards where you need to get to,” concluded McConnell.

Located in Buffalo, New York, Trocaire College is a private Catholic institution with a proud focus on career advancement. “The goal of a Trocaire College degree is to equip our students to become graduates of choice, fully prepared to thrive in a variety of in-demand career-oriented professions,” reads their website, and for more than six decades, they’ve delivered on this promise.

The team at Trocaire recognizes the growing role that technology plays in the modern workforce and regularly updates their approach to instruction accordingly. By embracing the latest in learning technology, they create graduates with strong digital literacy to complement skills in their chosen profession.

Modernizing the Learning Experience in a Short Timeframe

Trocaire observed that their previous learning management system (LMS), Moodle, was no longer fit for their purpose.

One consideration for Trocaire’s Digital Learning Team was artificial intelligence (AI). Trocaire was eager to explore the opportunity for this to be an integrated part of the learning experience. They wanted to find a clear AI approach and a partner with a history of including generative AI in their solutions.

The challenge—as is so often the case in higher education—is that they had only a limited time to move to a new LMS and many courses and materials that needed to be migrated. Trocaire went to market to look for a new LMS vendor that could not only help update their online learning experience but also ensure a quick and seamless transition.

A Collaborative Approach to Quickly Adopt Blackboard

After a market review, Trocaire chose Anthology Blackboard as their LMS to assist with modernization. They appreciated the market leadership in AI, robust mobile experience, and strong recent history of product innovation across content design, grading, and assessment. They enhanced Blackboard with Anthology Ally to improve the accessibility of course materials.

Trocaire started by assembling a core internal team— comprising IT, academic, and online learning professionals—to manage the project from start to finish. A major focus for this team was to ensure engagement with key stakeholders, particularly instructors and students, communicate the benefits of Blackboard, and explain the migration process. College leadership, including the president, chief information officer, chief financial officer, academic affairs, student affairs, and academic advisement, were all heavily involved and helped to drive the visibility of the transition plan across the institution.

An initial needs survey was distributed to instructors to understand key areas of focus for upskilling and training. A faculty pilot program was introduced during the summer. The early adopters assisted in rolling out peer-to-peer training prior to the fall semester and the school offered video demonstrations and personalized training sessions.

For students, a multi-channel communication plan was developed, including newsletters, a dedicated website, and instructional videos. An asynchronous Blackboard training course for students was created with support during the classes and promoted during the rollout. Anthology provided dedicated resources and support throughout the transition. A clear implementation plan was aligned upfront. Furthermore, varied Anthology experts were engaged to support the core Trocaire team and ensure a seamless transition. Anthology Academy training modules were rolled out to relevant stakeholders, including instructors and staff.

Finally, an important workstream focused on the migration of existing courses. Anthology provided the technology required for courses to be migrated in bulk, and instructors were given the option of moving their courses automatically or redesigning them using Trocaire templates in Blackboard. Office hours were established with the Trocaire Digital Learning Team, who collaborated with Anthology experts to decide which approach worked best for instructors and their courses. This combination of automated technology and user oversight allowed the institution to balance efficiency and effectiveness and quickly get learning materials available in their new LMS.

A Complete Overhaul of Online Learning, Launched in Just Six Weeks

You read that correctly! In just six weeks, Trocaire migrated to Blackboard. Having kept instructors and students engaged throughout the transition, both cohorts rapidly embraced the new platform.

Instructors at Trocaire are especially enjoying the AI Design Assistant in Blackboard to create course structure and assessments. In addition to making the process faster, many teachers have noted that it offers a different angle to a task they might not have thought of. This is complemented by workflows that make it much easier to embed content like video and publisher materials. This simplifies the often arduous and time-consuming task of instructional design. Instructors are also finding grading more streamlined, leveraging native insights on student progress to support those in need, accessing copyright-free imagery to add to courses, and using communication tools within the platform to improve learner engagement. They also love the Blackboard mobile experience which allows them to use the full scope of the LMS when on the go.

Learners noted that Blackboard is far easier to navigate than their previous LMS. They can locate key course content much faster, particularly when studying on their mobile device, and find the overall user experience more modern and intuitive. The inclusion of Anthology Ally has driven a sharp increase in accessibility for course content, with 88.9% of all courses now completely accessible and workflows in place to update the remaining courses.

Anthology extends profound thanks to Mary Beth Scumaci and the entire Trocaire College team for their ongoing partnership and advocacy. This culminated in a terrific presentation about their transition to Blackboard at our recent Digital Teaching Symposium, which is available on demand for members of the Anthology Community.

Ensuring that Education is Accessible to All University of Staffordshire has always been a big part of the community in ] Stoke-on-Trent, and it’s something that the institution is both proud of and sees a responsibility. “We’re a civic university; we’re based within the community,” said George Hill, online distance learning designer at University of Staffordshire.

“We’re kind of a core hub for everyone locally. So ensuring that our learning was accessible to everyone locally meant, to us, not just ensuring that it’s [accessible to] people that are physically nearby, but that the learning is accessible to anyone and everyone.” “We’ve got all different diverse ranges of students,” said Rowan Walker, student digital engagement officer. “From young students to maturer students with various different accessibility and disability needs.”

Of course, accessibility is a journey, not a one-time fix, and the digital learning team at Staffordshire wanted to do everything they could to move the university further along on that journey. “We did already have Ally at the university, but it was something that wasn’t really being utilized or looked at,” Hill said. Added Walker, “Our Ally score was averaging between 30 and about 50%.”

“There’s a knowledge gap in, what is digital accessibility?” said instructional designer Simran Cheema. “We always throw around the terms ‘accessibility’ and ‘inclusivity’, but what does that actually look like in terms of delivering digital learning content?”

Integrating Ally from the Start

Hill and Walker joined the team at around the same time, and they found a perfect opportunity to begin integrating Ally right into the university’s digital learning landscape. “When me and George joined, the technology team was going through a little bit of a reshuffle,” Walker said. “And at the same time, we’re also shifting away from Blackboard Original to Blackboard Ultra. So new team, new direction as well as the new platform. It allowed us to snowball everything into one cohesive thing.”

A big piece of this was to seamlessly include Ally in Blackboard trainings. “The main focus in the early days was, here is Blackboard, you need to learn about this right now,” Hill said. “There’s also Ally, and we can cover that later. It’s now, here’s how you’re going to use Blackboard, you’re an instructor, you know how to use a VLE [virtual learning environment]. Here’s how we’re going to make the best of it, here’s how you can actually level up your content, and here’s how you can use Ally to do that.”

In order to continue to help faculty and staff fully utilize the Ally tool and get them thinking about creating content that is accessible from the start, the team ran workshops, created guides and resources, and answered questions as needed.

They also established, at the beginning of the 2024-2025 academic year, a requirement that all content in Blackboard must meet at least an 80% accessibility score in Ally. This made Fix Your Content Day, an event run by Anthology in October in which institutions are encouraged to compete to see who can make the most accessible content fixes in a 24-hour period, perfectly timed for University of Staffordshire. As such, the team prepared diligently and focused on getting the word out to the campus community: they met with instructors and staff, made tutorial videos on using Ally to make fixes, and sent out communications through different channels as well to make sure everyone was ready for the event. And on the day itself, participation was made easy. “During the day, we did both in-person and online drop-in sessions,” said Walker. “We held a space where people could come in and just try different stuff with us, and if they needed help and support, that was all available to them.”

And their push paid off: University of Staffordshire had the most fixes in the entire Europe and Middle East region with 7,282 total, which also put them in fifth place globally. Talk about taking a big step on the accessibility journey!

Making Accessibility Part of the Day-to-Day

The response from university staff, instructors, and students has been positive, especially since Ally puts the power of making these fixes right in their hands. “It actually shows you where the accessibility changes need to be made and gives you guidance on how to make those changes,” Cheema said. “Staff are able to then go in themselves, develop those skills and that understanding.” Hill added that the fact that Ally is integrated right into Blackboard has also helped adoption and usage immensely. “The fact that they’re not having to go to another site and having to load up another tool makes it so much easier.” he said.

Students have also been sending in fewer questions to the technology team asking for assistance accessing documents at the same time as reports show that Ally usage is jumping, which indicates that the “[Fix Your Content Day] was a springboard for us to implement these initiatives and start those important discussions. — Simran Cheema Instructional Designer, University of Staffordshire Insights Delivered tool is having an impact: in 2024, there were 18,747 total unique user downloads, which was up 22% from 2023. And students are downloading the content across all formats, with tagged PDFs, HTML, and ePub being the most popular. In addition, the university prioritizing accessibility has led to students doing the same. “This has led to some students asking questions about accessibility and how they can be accessible as well...so they can generate that content themselves,” Walker said. “Which we’re very happy about.”

Another benefit the team has found in using Ally heavily is that it creates a clear standard for what accessible content looks like. “It takes the guesswork out of what makes something accessible,” Cheema said. “You’re actually able to define what is accessible on your VLE and then you have a great way of monitoring it.”

And, of course, greater accessibility benefits all learners and staff, not just those with disabilities. “It’s that UDL, Universal Design for Learning principle, where an automatic door benefits everyone,” Hill said. Overall, there’s been huge buy-in across the university to Ally and making all materials more accessible. “We’ve seen massive adoption of a lot of these different initiatives even from our own executive director,” Hill said. “Every paper that is submitted from our department must be accessible and must be meeting the same criteria that we treat learning materials with.”

Moving forward, University of Staffordshire remains committed to integrating accessibility best practices into daily workflows and content creation. “We don’t know how much we’ll participate in next year’s Fix Your Content Day, because the aim of it is to have staff post accessible content all the time,” Walker said. “So we’re not looking for that massive increase like we did last time. We want the content to be accessible before it hits that VLE.”

When asked for advice for universities looking to implement Ally, Hill said, “It’s something to invest in sooner rather than later, and have a strategy going alongside it. Putting together that plan makes it so much more effective and it gives you the full power that that tool has.”

Walker added, “It’s really important to go out and talk to students and see what issues they’ve got. And that goes for staff as well...just asking questions like, ‘How have you accessed your content during this time?’ It gives you the chance to reflect, but also, tools like Ally can come in and help you implement something new, which is what we’ve tried to do at University of Staffordshire.”