Digital Accessibility Tools
Browse the digital accessibility tools offered by the University of Mississippi.
Tools to Help You Meet Accessibility Standards
UM Digital Accessibility makes available or recommends the following tools to support the creation and maintenance of accessible digital content at the University of Mississippi.
UM Document Converter, in partnership with Sensus Access, is available to any faculty, staff, or students at the University of Mississippi. While it does not provide a completely accessible document, it is useful to convert scanned PDFs to more accessible versions and allows users to choose the type of output that works best for their needs.
Blackboard Ally is an external tool integrated into Blackboard to support accessibility and universal design for students and instructors at the University of Mississippi. Ally provides instructor-facing accessibility reviews for Blackboard course content. It then provides guidance and tips for improving accessibility, as well as automatically creating alternative formats of downloadable files for your students. Only instructors can see the colored accessibility score dial next to each file. All students have access to on-demand alternative versions of course files.
The videos and associated resources below highlight the key features of Anthology Ally in Blackboard.
The University of Mississippi is committed to creating and maintaining a welcoming and inclusive educational and working environment for all people of all abilities and to ensuring equal access to information and services for all its constituencies.
The University is committed to adhering to the requirements of Sections 504 and 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), as amended, by providing reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities.
Pre-Recorded Video
SDS Captioning Accommodations - Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act requires that instructors provide accurate captions for students with a captioning accommodation through SDS. UM Digital Accessibility will work with any instructors who receive notice that a student in their course has a captioning accommodation to caption any videos used in their courses, whether shown during class or posted in Blackboard.
- ALL videos posted in Blackboard must be captioned as one of the requirements of the new ADA Title II Digital Accessibility regulation.
- Please contact accessibility@olemiss.edu for assistance with captioning of your course content, whether you use videos you have created or if you source them from a third-party like YouTube or Vimeo.
ALL videos posted on a UM website or social media account must contain captions. UM Digital Accessibility can work with your team to develop a workflow for captioning of these videos. Contact accessibility@olemiss.edu for more information on captioning of web and social media content.
- Videos hosted in a public YouTube or Vimeo account that are not posted on a website, on social media, or in Blackboard must be captioned starting in April 2026.
Live Captioning for Events
Event Live captioning is recommended as a proactive accessibility feature for campus events. UM Accessibility provides a live captioning service through our third-party captioning vendor, Verbit. It is available for any event hosted by Ole Miss faculty, staff, or students and is recommended for larger events where the access needs of all attendees are not known.
- Requests for event live captioning can be submitted through the Event Accessibility Request Form.
Live (CART) captioning for accommodations in courses is managed through Student Disability Services.
POET Alternative Text Tool is an open-source tool with training on when and how to create alternative text for images in digital content and includes a section to practice creating effective alternative text.
For more information on writing alternative text see UM's Guide to Writing Alternative Text
Color Contrast Analyzer is an application that is downloaded to your computer to make sure that the colors used in a design, document, or on the website are compliant. The tool is available for download and can be used for content on websites, social media, in documents, in presentation, and more.
DubBot is an automated web scanning tool that is available for UM websites. It is used to monitor the overall performance of our website, but it can also be used by website owners on campus to monitor their own sites and pages, as well as work through identified issues.
In addition to accessibility issues, DubBot also checks for misspelled words, broken links, and compliance with some of our web governance policies. Access and training on the tool is available upon request by emailing accessibility@olemiss.edu.
Due to the complexity and skill level required to remediate PDF files in Adobe Acrobat, the University of Mississippi has chosen to make the CommonLook remediation tool available to those who produce a large volume of PDF files. The goal of using this software over Acrobat is to reduce the time and knowledge required to produce accessible PDFs, however there is still a time investment required.