Case Study: The University Of Manchester achieves campus-wide digital accessibility and improved student learning with Anthology Ally

Proactive, not reactive: how the University of Manchester shifted their approach to digital accessibility

The University Of Manchester, a Russell Group institution with over 40,000 students, had been reacting to digital accessibility issues for years and faced an overwhelming volume of course content needing review. To move from a fragmented, manual approach to a scalable solution, the university partnered with Anthology and deployed the Anthology Ally product to bring accessibility to the heart of teaching.

Anthology implemented Ally to scan, measure, report and track accessibility across courses, support more than 6,000 academics, and help the university meet Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations. As a result, The University Of Manchester saw a 4% drop in missing image descriptions (12% better than the U.K. average), a 3% reduction in scanned PDFs, nearly 50% of students downloading alternative formats in autumn 2020, and over 329,000 alternative-format downloads since January 2019 — improvements Anthology continues to help the university quantify and scale.

The University Of Manchester

Ian Hutt

Head of Digital Learning