Differences Between Ally and Other Accessibility Checkers
As powerful of a tool as Ally is, there are some differences that are important to note.
First, if you’ve used the Microsoft Word or D2L HTML page checkers very often, you’re used to them flagging things that are wrong. If you’re missing alternative text on a picture, Word will find that and tell you. And it can tell you if your heading structure is out of order. But if you haven’t added a heading structure, Word can’t tell you that you should have one.
Ally, however, takes things like the length of the document into account. If your Word document is approximately 12 paragraphs and you don’t have a heading structure, Ally will suggest that you need headings. Even when Word’s checker does not find any issues in your document, Ally’s checker may still find ways to improve it.
In other words, Ally doesn’t just flag items to correct. Instead, it gives you a score and indicates the severity or urgency of issues with color-coded indicators. This means Ally sees your document not as “accessible” or “not accessible” but as falling on a spectrum of “more accessible to less accessible.”
Second, because Ally also converts content into other formats, it may flag items in one format (such as a Word document) that it knows may cause problems when converting to another. For instance, in a Word document, if you set the table headings in the “Format Table” ribbon, but don’t set them to “repeat on each page” under table settings, Word will say the table is fine, but Ally will say it’s not. This is because Ally knows it may be asked to turn that document into a PDF, and that setting will not
carry over in the conversion process. So, Ally will report this as an issue and show you how you can fix it.
Third, Ally is responsive to the content itself rather than simply the format. Because PDFs, PowerPoint
files, and Word documents are different types of documents, you may receive different
scores for the same document saved into different formats.
You will also want to note that the length of the document may indicate to Ally that certain accessibility features are or are not needed. For instance, a simple
Word document with one or two paragraphs may score perfectly even without styled headings.
But after twelve paragraphs, Ally will assume the document should be broken up by headings to be more readable.
Ally's Accessibility Checklist goes into great detail to explain the standards it uses to check the accessibility
of your documents.
|