The long-awaited new Blackboard Content Editor has arrived for SaaS, Managed Hosted, and Self Hosted Deployments. This is the first in a series of posts highlighting new features in the content editor. In this post, I’ll be discussing the new Accessibility Checker.
Accessibility Checker Overview
One of the key new features is a built-in Accessibility Checker that scans for WCAG and Section 508 accessibility problems. It’s important to note that this checker is separate from Blackboard Ally, and institutions do not need to be an Ally customer to use this functionality.
To get started, you can simply click the person icon in the toolbar, and the accessibility checker will appear. From here, you can see the error, a short description, and the opportunity to fix the issue. To quickly toggle between errors, you can use the up and down arrows located at the top right of the dialog box.

What It Checks
As of the release of this post, the following items are checked:
- Proper use of headings. Instead of bolding text.
- Headings in sequential order
- Adjacent links
- Ordered list structure
- Unordered list structure
- Contrast ratio of the text
- Alternative text for images
- Alternative text is not the same as the filename
- Table caption
- Complex table summary
- Table caption and summary
- Table markup
- Table headers
- Table heading scope
- Unique IDs
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