Release Notes for Ally - 2018

Ally 1.23.4 | Release to production 11 December 2018

New Features, Updated Features

Learn Ultra image descriptions

The Learn Ultra integration update automatically applies alternative descriptions for images set directly through the LMS as an alternative description for other uses of the image in the course. The automated process is reflected accordingly in the institutional report and applies automatically to all new images and all new and updated WYSIWYG content.

Bug fixes and improvements

  • Fixed an issue to make the Help link in the alternative formats available for the Ally for WCM integration.

Ally 1.23.3 | Release to production 4 December 2018

New Features, Updated Features

Instructor Help

Following the introduction of configurable help content for the alternative formats modal in Ally 1.23, Ally 1.23.3 brings the ability to configure custom help messaging for the Ally instructor feedback. This provides institutions an opportunity to point instructors to additional institutional documentation, contact information, and so on. The custom instructor help content can be configured through the Ally Configuration UI, and is available throughout the instructor feedback experience.

Instructor experience

Canvas administrators

Following the User Group poll, the Canvas administrator behavior has been made configurable. By default, administrators will only be able to see Ally in courses that have Ally enabled in the configuration UI. However, there is also an option to opt in to administrators being able to see Ally in all courses they can manage, regardless of their setting in the configuration UI (i.e., previous Canvas administrator behavior).

Please create a Behind The Blackboard support ticket if you want to opt into the ability for Canvas administrators to always see Ally in all courses. Institutions that indicated in the poll that they rely on this feature have already been enabled.

Institutional report and Configuration UI performance

Ally 1.23.3 introduces an underlying technology change that significantly speeds up the listing and searching for courses in the institutional report and configuration UI. This is also an important step toward allowing more complex querying and sorting in the institutional report going forward.

Ally 1.23.3 bug fixes and improvements

  • Show the correct title in the institutional report for WYSIWYG content in the Learn Ultra integration.
  • Improved the recognition of the primary content language for PDF, Word and Powerpoint documents.

Ally 1.23.2 | Release to production 28 November 2018

Updated Features

Bug fixes and improvements

  • Fixed a bug that caused the Audio alternative format to be generated in an incorrect language for certain non-English languages.
  • Correctly change back to the first page of results when searching for courses in the Configuration UI.

Ally 1.23.1 | Release to production 23 November 2018

Updated Features

Bug fixes and improvements

  • Fixed a bug that prevented downloading of files from the institutional report when launched through the direct access URL.
  • Fixed a bug in the Canvas integration that would cause some sub-account admins to see the accessibility indicators in courses they can't manage.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented alternative formats generating correctly for tagged PDFs containing empty or invalid tags.
  • Fixed a bug in the Learn Ultra integration that prevented library references provided through the instructor feedback from displaying in the alternative formats modal.
  • Improved the accessibility of the dropdown button in the Canvas integration by announcing it as “Actions”.
  • Added an indication that the instructor feedback will open in a new window when launching it from the institutional report.

Ally 1.23 | Release to production 14 November 2018

New Features, Updated Features

Student Help

Ally 1.23 introduces the ability to configure a custom student help message that will be displayed in the Alternative Formats modal. This custom help message can be used to point students to existing institutional documentation, share contact information, and so on. The custom help content can be configured in the Ally Configuration UI, and uses the Markdown format to help provide a structured (and accessible) message.

When no custom message has been configured, the Help link points to a default Ally documentation page that explains how and when the different alternative formats can be used.

This is the first of several help features. Upcoming releases will include the ability to configure custom help content for instructors and the ability for students and instructors to reach out for help from Ally.

Student experience

Ally 1.23 bug fixes and improvements

  • The course enrollment number displayed in the institutional report no longer includes disabled enrollments for Blackboard Learn institutions.
  • Implemented several improvements to the language detection for Microsoft Office documents.
  • Fixed a bug that would cause the Please enter an image description error message to flash when marking an image as decorative in the instructor feedback.
  • Fixed a bug in the Canvas integration that would prevent the window from growing sufficiently when opening the content preview.

Ally 1.22.1 | Release to production 6 November 2018

Updated Features

Bug fixes and improvements

  • Fixed a bug that prevented a language from being selected for the Translated Version alternative format in certain browsers.

Ally 1.22 | Release to production 5 November 2018

New Features, Updated Features

Ally for Blackboard Learn Ultra

Ally is now available for Blackboard Learn courses using the Ultra experience. While content from Learn Ultra courses was already present in the institutional report, it is now possible to download alternative formats and receive instructor feedback for content within Ultra courses.

Note that this is Milestone 1 of the Ally integration for Learn Ultra, and this will be followed by additional functionality such as the ability to see accessibility indicators in the “Course Outline” and alternative formats in additional areas.

Ally 1.22 accessibility improvements

A range of additional accessibility improvements have been introduced:

  • Ensure that keyboard focus is set to the previously selected element when closing the Alternative Formats modal.
  • Fixed several contrast issues in the Alternative Formats modal.
  • Improvements to preventing background from receiving keyboard focus when opening the Alternative Formats modal.

Ally 1.22 bug fixes and improvements

  • Allow for a library reference to be submitted without a URL in the instructor feedback for scanned and untagged PDFs.
  • Fixed an image that didn’t load correctly in the “How to write a good description” documentation for images.
  • Improvements to the recognition of scanned documents that have been OCRd.

Ally 1.21 | Release to production 22 October 2018

New Features, Updated Features

Instructor feedback in institutional report

It is now possible to access the instructor feedback and fix accessibility issues directly from the institutional report. Administrators, disability services, and instructional designers can now improve content items from a single place. This is also foundational work for the upcoming instructor-facing course report.

Go to the institutional report in your LMS. From the Accessibility issues table, find a specific content item in a course with an accessibility issue. Select the content item's accessibility score indicator to open the feedback panel.

More on the accessibility score and instructor feedback panel

This feature is disabled by default. Submit a request on Behind The Blackboard to have it turned on.

This feature is only available when accessing the institutional report from the LMS and not when using the direct access URL.

Image descriptions

The Blackboard Learn and Canvas integrations have been updated to pick up on alternative descriptions for images set directly through the LMS (i.e,. WYSIWYG editor) and automatically apply these as a fallback alternative description for other uses of the image in the course (e.g., Content Collection, Files Tool). This will also be reflected accordingly in the institutional report.

This functionality will be applied automatically to all new images and all new/updated WYSIWYG content.

This functionality will also be introduced for the Moodle and Blackboard Open LMS integrations in a future Ally release, which will also require an upgrade to the Ally Moodle plugin.

Image description instructor feedback

Based on usability testing feedback, “alternative description” has been renamed to “image description” in the instructor feedback to help instructors better understand the purpose of the description.

At the same, an additional panel has been added to the “How to write a good description" guidance on what to avoid when writing an image description.

Ally 1.21 accessibility improvements

Building on the accessibility improvements that were introduced in Ally 1.20.1, this release contains a number of additional accessibility improvements:

  • Improved keyboard accessibility for the carousel component in the instructor feedback, allowing for a content panel to receive focus by pressing the space bar.
  • Improved keyboard focus when navigating to the next page of instructions in the instructor feedback.
  • Improved screen reader accessibility for optional form fields when entering a library reference for a scanned or untagged PDF.

Ally 1.20.1 | Release to production 17 October 2018

New Features, Updated Features

Accessibility improvements

As part of a full independent Ally accessibility audit and in anticipation of an updated Ally VPAT, a range of accessibility improvements have been introduced:

  • Screen reader accessibility of the validation messages when providing an alternative description for image has been improved.
  • Screen reader accessibility of the “Translated Version” alternative format option in the alternative formats modal has been improved.
  • Improved initial keyboard focus when opening the alternative formats modal.
  • Improved the contrast ratio for input field placeholder messages.

Ally 1.20.1 Big fixes and improvements

  • Fixed a bug in the institutional report CSV export that caused values to show under the incorrect columns.
  • Fixed a bug that caused printing instructor feedback instruction to result in an empty page in Chrome.
  • Improved handling of content items that are reported by the LMS as being created in the future.

Ally integration available for the Ultra Course View

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3500.3.0 | Release to Production 1 November 2018
Ultra Course View

Starting with this release, Blackboard Ally integrates with the Ultra Course View. Ally provides detailed accessibility reports for content uploaded to Blackboard Learn. The integration is available to institutions who license Ally. 

In the Ultra Course View, instructors have access to Ally’s accessibility scores and feedback, including tutorials on how to make common file types more accessible to learners of all abilities. Students can view and download course content in alternative accessible formats. 

In a future release, we’ll show the file’s accessibility score on the Course Content page so instructors can quickly prioritize items to edit. 

Get started with Blackboard Ally

Ally 1.20 | Release to production 11 October 2018

New Features, Updated Features

Contrast issues guidance

A full new Instructor Feedback guidance flow has been added for documents (PDFs, Word and Powerpoint) that contain text with insufficient contrast. This contains documentation on why this is important, different types of contrast issues and step-by-step guidance on how text with insufficient contrast can be fixed.

Microsoft® Office 2013 and 365 guidance

The Instructor Feedback guidance has been expanded in several areas to also include documentation for Microsoft Office 2013 and Microsoft Office 365.

Images Without Alternative Descriptions guidance

As part of the Ally 1.19 release, the Ally accessibility checklist was updated to support the new ways in which alternative descriptions for images can be provided in Office 365, as well as how images can be marked as decorative.

Ally 1.20 contains fully updated Instructor Feedback guidance to reflect these Office 365 improvements.

Institutional Report CSV export

The institutional report CSV export functionality has been improved to only include columns for the content types that are relevant for the current Learning Management System or Content Management System.

Ally 1.20 Big fixes and improvements

  • Improved how links are announced in the Audio alternative format.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the incorrect course score to show in the “Courses” list in the institutional report. The actual course report already always showed the correct course score.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented tagged PDFs with multiple root “Document” tags from generating correct alternative formats.
  • Improved the stability of the accessibility check that verifies whether embedded YouTubeTM videos have been captioned.

Ally 1.19.4 | Release to production 25 September 2018

Updated Features

Big fixes and improvements

  • Improved the Ally for WCM and Ally for Web integrations to always use a consistent viewport width when checking HTML pages for accessibility issues.
  • Further improved the wording of the Terms of Use for the alternative formats.
  • Introduced stability improvements to the YouTube caption accessibility check.

Ally 1.19.3 | Release to production 9 September, 2018

Blackboard Learn Integration, Updated features

Bug fixes and improvements

  • Fixed a bug in the Blackboard Learn integration that would cause the accessibility indicators for attachments in a Learn Content Item to not be properly aligned on all Learn skins

A special note from Product Management

Ally 1.19.2 | Release to Production 6 September, 2018

We are developing our teaching and learning products toward the greater good of a holistic, next generation digital learning environment through the lens of three critical, unifying product themes: academic effectiveness, learner engagement, and education insight. By focusing on these themes, we will unify the development of our products to empower excellence in teaching and learning, inspire genuine interest, attention, and interaction in the learning process, and enable continuous improvement through accurate and deep understanding of the teaching and learning process.

In the Ally 1.19.2 release, we focused our development and design on academic effectiveness and learner engagement. You’ll see below that we’ve also aligned our feature list into groups based on value and benefit to you and your users.

Universal design

  • Deleted courses

Ally 1.19.2 | Release to production 6 September, 2018

Updated features

Deleted courses

Ally now picks up on deleted courses and reflects these accordingly in the institutional report. This results in the following functionality:

  • Deleted courses will no longer show in the By Term report and will no longer contribute to the term’s accessibility score. Deleted courses will also no longer show in the Courses tab and the Ally Configuration UI.
  • Deleted courses will still be included in the By Month and By Academic Year reports for historical reporting purposes. However, they will be marked as Deleted when viewing the list of courses with an issue in a specific month/year.

There will be a delay between deleting a course and Ally picking up on this. However, the deleted courses should eventually be reflected correctly in the institutional report.

Bug fixes and improvements

  • Fixed a bug that would cause certain alternative formats to not have the correct spaces between words.
  • Fixed a bug where a tagged PDF containing an empty document tag would not be recognized as a tagged PDF.

A special note from Product Management

Continuous Delivery v1.19.1 | Release to Production 31 August, 2018

We are developing our teaching and learning products toward the greater good of a holistic, next generation digital learning environment through the lens of three critical, unifying product themes: academic effectiveness, learner engagement, and education insight. By focusing on these themes, we will unify the development of our products to empower excellence in teaching and learning, inspire genuine interest, attention, and interaction in the learning process, and enable continuous improvement through accurate and deep understanding of the teaching and learning process.

In the Ally 1.19.1 release, we focused our development and design on academic effectiveness and learner engagement. You’ll see below that we’ve also aligned our feature list into groups based on value and benefit to you and your users.

Universal design

  • Alternative format on mobile devices
  • Institutional Report Overview

Ally 1.19.1 | Release to production 31 August, 2018

Updated features

Alternative format on mobile devices

The HTML alternative format is now fully responsive, which greatly improves the readability and usability on mobile devices. The HTML and ePub alternative formats have also been styled (font, heading styling, table styling, etc.) to improve readability even further.

Institutional Report Overview

Several improvements have been introduced in the Overview page of the institutional report. Institutions that don’t take advantage of the LMS terms functionality now automatically see the By Academic Year view, rather than first seeing the empty By Term view.

For institutions that do take advantage of the LMS terms functionality, terms that don’t have any associated courses or content are now hidden from the institutional report. This cleans up the report significantly, and makes the overview chart much more readable.

Bug fixes and improvements

  • Fixed a bug that prevented the audio alternative format from playing on mobile devices for institutions hosted in the Frankfurt, Singapore or Sydney data centers.

A special note from Product Management

Continuous Delivery v1.19 | Release to Production 28 August, 2018

We are developing our teaching and learning products toward the greater good of a holistic, next generation digital learning environment through the lens of three critical, unifying product themes: academic effectiveness, learner engagement, and education insight. By focusing on these themes, we will unify the development of our products to empower excellence in teaching and learning, inspire genuine interest, attention, and interaction in the learning process, and enable continuous improvement through accurate and deep understanding of the teaching and learning process.

In the Ally 1.19 release, we focused our development and design on academic effectiveness and learner engagement. You’ll see below that we’ve also aligned our feature list into groups based on value and benefit to you and your users.

Universal design

  • Alternative formats update
  • Microsoft® Office update
  • Institutional Report update

Ally 1.19 | Release to production 28 August, 2018

New features, Updated features

Disable alternative formats

It is now possible for an instructor or administrator to disable the alternative formats for an individual content item within a course. This provides full flexibility over which content items should have alternative formats, and can be especially useful for content items that don’t have a license that allows the creation of alternative formats.

Students now also have to agree to the Terms of Use for the alternative formats before being able to download them.

Microsoft Office updates

Microsoft® Office recently introduced new functionality that simplifies how an alternative description for an image can be provided and allows for an image to be marked as decorative. Ally is fully compatible with this new functionality, and now also recognizes images that have been marked as decorative.

Institutional Report improvements

The historical “By Academic Year” and “By Month” views in the institutional report will now show whether an issue detected by Ally has since been fixed.

Bug fixes and improvements

  • Several irrelevant columns have been removed from the Ally for Websites CSV export.
  • Fixed a bug where an ePub alternative format may not load correctly because of special characters in the content.
  • Improved encoding detection for HTML content.
  • Fixed a bug in the Canvas integration where an instructor would not be able to upload an improved version of a content item through the Instructor Feedback because of a change in the Canvas API.
  • Fixed a bug where Ally would incorrectly pick up on invisible artifacts such as EMF, PICT and WMF files in Microsoft Office documents.

A special note from Product Management

Continuous Delivery v1.18 | Release to Production 22 August, 2018

We are developing our teaching and learning products toward the greater good of a holistic, next generation digital learning environment through the lens of three critical, unifying product themes: academic effectiveness, learner engagement, and education insight. By focusing on these themes, we will unify the development of our products to empower excellence in teaching and learning, inspire genuine interest, attention, and interaction in the learning process, and enable continuous improvement through accurate and deep understanding of the teaching and learning process.

In the Ally 1.18 release, we focused our development and design on academic effectiveness and learner engagement. You’ll see below that we’ve also aligned our feature list into groups based on value and benefit to you and your users.

Universal design

  • Moodle WYSIWYG content reporting
  • Audio alternative format update
  • Institutional Report updates

Ally 1.18 | Release to production 22 August, 2018

New features, Moodle Integration, Updated features

Moodle WYSIWYG content reporting

Ally 1.18 introduces the ability to check content created in the Moodle WYSIWYG editor for accessibility issues, and includes these results in the institutional report.

These Moodle WYSIWYG content types are currently supported:

  • Course summary
  • Section
  • Label
  • Forum description
  • Forum post (first in thread)
  • Glossary description
  • Glossary entry
  • Assignment

This functionality is available for all institutions using Blackboard Open LMS or self-hosted Moodle institutions using version 3.4.3 of the Ally Moodle plugin. WYSIWYG content reporting will automatically be enabled for institutions on these supported versions, and any courses with new activity should show the WYSIWYG content results in the institutional report.

Going forward, institutions upgrading the Moodle Ally plugin should create a support ticket to request that this functionality is enabled.

Audio Alternative format

In the audio alternative format, images without an alternative description that follow each other are grouped in a single “x images without an alternative format” to help remove some redundancy from the generated audio.

Institutional Report updates

Improvements made through the Ally Instructor Feedback are now reflected immediately in that course’s report within the Institutional Report. This removes the 15 minute delay that was previously present.

Bug fixes and improvements

  • Introduced several improvements to the contrast checking algorithm, especially in cases where individual punctuation marks were incorrectly generating contrast issues.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented Ally from successfully checking HTML files with older encoding (e.g., CP1252 instead of UTF-8) for accessibility issues.
  • Improved the Instructor Feedback to always provide an upload option, including when guidance is not yet available.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented the successful creation of the Electronic Braille Alternative Format for Croatian documents.
  • Fixed a bug in the Ally for Websites integration that removes the number of web pages from the reported number of files/attachments.

A special note from Product Management

Continuous Delivery v1.17 | Release to Production 2 August, 2018

We are developing our teaching and learning products toward the greater good of a holistic, next generation digital learning environment through the lens of three critical, unifying product themes: academic effectiveness, learner engagement, and education insight. By focusing on these themes, we will unify the development of our products to empower excellence in teaching and learning, inspire genuine interest, attention, and interaction in the learning process, and enable continuous improvement through accurate and deep understanding of the teaching and learning process.

In the Ally 1.17 release, we focused our development and design on academic effectiveness and learner engagement. You’ll see below that we’ve also aligned our feature list into groups based on value and benefit to you and your users.

Universal design

  • Blackboard Learn WYSIWYG content reporting

Ally 1.17 | Release to production 2 August, 2018

New features, Blackboard Learn Integration, Canvas Integration, Updated features, Web Community Manager Integration

Blackboard Learn WYSIWYG content reporting

Ally 1.17 introduces the ability to check content created in the Blackboard Learn WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor for accessibility issues, and includes these results in the institutional report. This allows Ally to review a significantly larger part of the Blackboard Learn content, and is a first step towards providing alternative formats and instructor feedback for this content.

These Blackboard Learn WYSIWYG content types are currently supported.

  • Content Item (Build Content > Create > Item)
  • Blank Page (Build Content > New Page > Blank Page)
  • Web Link (Build Content > Web Link)
  • Content Folder (Build Content > New Page > Content Folder)
  • Learning Module (Build Content > Create > Learning Module)
  • Lesson Plan (Build Content > Create > Lesson plan)
  • Module Page (Build Content > New Page > Module Page)
  • A link to a Forum (Tools > Discussion Board)

This functionality is available for all institutions using SaaS, the Q4 2017 CU4 release (or above) and the Q2 2018 CU1 release (or above). WYSIWYG content reporting will automatically be enabled for institutions on these supported versions, and any courses with new activity should show the WYSIWYG content results in the institutional report.

Going forward, institutions upgrading to a supported release should create a ticket to request that this functionality is enabled.

The ability to check for accessibility issues in Moodle WYSIWYG content will be included in one of our upcoming releases.

Canvas API token

Following changes in the Canvas permission system, it is now possible for the Canvas API token used by Ally to have fewer associated permissions than before.

As the "ACCOUNT PERMISSIONS - Manage account-level settings” permission is no longer required to retrieve the list of available terms, this permission can now be removed from the Ally API token.

These are the permissions required for a Canvas integration.

  • Courses - view list
  • Users - act as
  • Announcements - view
  • Assignments and Quizzes - add / edit / delete
  • Course Content - add / edit / delete
  • Course Content - view
  • Course Files - add / edit / delete
  • Discussions - moderate
  • Discussions - view
  • Pages - add / edit / delete

More on generating an Ally access token

Bug fixes and improvements

  • Fixed a bug that prevented the course report in the institutional report from automatically updating following a course copy.
  • Fixed a bug where paragraph text that spans multiple pages could be missing from the alternative formats.
  • Fixed a bug in the Web Community Manager integration that prevented some dynamically loaded content (through JavaScript) from being incorporated in the accessibility checks for a web page.
  • Fixed a bug in the Learn integration that caused a failure when setting the alternative description for an image embedded in a large Content Item (200KB+)

Ally 1.16.7 | Release to production 22 July, 2018

Updated features

Bug fixes and improvements

  • Fixed a bug that caused the audio alternative format to use the incorrect language for certain PDFs.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented PowerPoint documents with embedded audio from receiving an accessibility score.
  • Fixed a bug in the institutional report that would cause the reported number of items with an issue in the “By Year” view to be different than the actual number of items listed.

Ally 1.16.6 | Release to production 6 July, 2018

Updated features

Copyright restrictions

Because of copyright restrictions, Ally will not generate alternative formats for PDFs that have one of these properties set to “Not Allowed” as part of its metadata.

  • Content Copying
  • Content Copying for Accessibility

Ally 1.16.5 | Release to production 2 July, 2018

Updated features

Term moving

A course that is moved between terms will now automatically show in the correct term in the institutional report as soon as a new activity takes place in the course.

Bug fixes and improvements

  • Fixed a bug in the Learn integration that could cause a content item to be listed in the incorrect year in the institutional report. This was caused by a bug in Xythos that prevents the content item from having the correct “Last Modified” date.

 

A special note from Product Management

Continuous Delivery v1.16.4 | Release to Production 21 June, 2018

We are developing our teaching and learning products toward the greater good of a holistic, next generation digital learning environment through the lens of three critical, unifying product themes: academic effectiveness, learner engagement, and education insight. By focusing on these themes, we will unify the development of our products to empower excellence in teaching and learning, inspire genuine interest, attention, and interaction in the learning process, and enable continuous improvement through accurate and deep understanding of the teaching and learning process.

In the Ally 1.16.4 release, we focused our development and design on academic effectiveness and learner engagement. You’ll see below that we’ve also aligned our feature list into groups based on value and benefit to you and your users.

Universal design

  • Institutional report improvements

Ally 1.16.4 | Release to production 21 June, 2018

New features, Updated features

Institutional report improvements

Several improvements have been added to the institutional report CSV exports.

Library references provided through the Ally instructor feedback for scanned and untagged PDFs are now included in a Library reference column in the course CSV export for individual courses. This is intended to make it easier to review library references provided by instructors.

The new Library reference column is not the same as LibraryReference, which counts the number of items that don't have references and could be improved with them.

The severity level for each reported issue is now also included as part of the CSV exports. This makes it easier to parse the severity of each issue in an automated way.

The severity level is included in the column headings. For example, ImageSeizure:1 and AlternativeText:3.

  • 1 represents severe issues
  • 2 represents major issues
  • 3 represents minor issues

More on the institution report export

Bug fixes and improvements

  • Fixed a bug in the Moodle(rooms) integration that would cause unexpected items from being included in the institutional report, including Moodle skin resources and assignment feedback resources. We are also in the process of removing these resources from the existing institutional reports.
  • Fixed a bug in the Moodle(rooms) integration that prevented image previews from showing in the instructor feedback for images.
  • Implemented several accuracy improvements to the contrast accessibility checks for HTML content.
  • Fixed a bug that incorrectly reported “The page contains form elements without labels” errors for HTML content.

A special note from Product Management

Continuous Delivery v1.16.3 | Release to Production 8 June, 2018

We are developing our teaching and learning products toward the greater good of a holistic, next generation digital learning environment through the lens of three critical, unifying product themes: academic effectiveness, learner engagement, and education insight. By focusing on these themes, we will unify the development of our products to empower excellence in teaching and learning, inspire genuine interest, attention, and interaction in the learning process, and enable continuous improvement through accurate and deep understanding of the teaching and learning process.

In the Ally 1.16.3 release, we focused our development and design on academic effectiveness and learner engagement. You’ll see below that we’ve also aligned our feature list into groups based on value and benefit to you and your users.

Universal design

  • Audio alternative format improvements

Ally 1.16.3 | Release to production 8 June, 2018

New features, Updated features

Audio alternative format

Several quality and usability improvements have been added to the audio alternative format, such as announcing the corresponding column and/or row heading for a table cell.

Bug fixes and improvements

  • Fixed a bug that would cause spaces to be missing in the alternative formats for specific PDFs.
  • Fixed a bug that caused headings in single slide PowerPoint presentations to not be recognized correctly.
  • Fixed a bug in the Canvas integration that prevented the instructor feedback indicator from showing when wrapped in an `<i>` or `<em>` element.
  • Implemented several accuracy improvements to the contrast accessibility check for PDF documents.

Ally 1.16.2 | Release to production 23 May, 2018

Updated features

Bug fixes and improvements

  • Fixed a bug in the Canvas integration that caused the Preview button to download the file instead of showing the expected preview.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented the “Other” content items (for example, content items that couldn’t be checked for accessibility issues) from showing in the institutional report.
  • Ensure that checking an HTML content item for accessibility issues doesn’t fail when a YouTube video can’t be checked for valid captions.
  • Renamed “courses” to “sections” in the Web Community Manager institutional report CSV exports.

Ally 1.16.1 | Release to Production 15 May, 2018

Updated features

Bug fixes and improvements

  • Fixed a bug that caused the alternative formats to be available for content used in locked Canvas modules for students that are an instructor in a different course.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the list of available languages for the Translated Version alternative format to not render correctly on IE11.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented table column headers from being announced as table headers in the audio alternative format.
  • The reported number of students in the institutional report for a Learn course no longer includes instructors or other administrator roles.
  • Implemented several visual improvements in the configuration UI.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the alternative formats dropdown in Canvas to be partially hidden when opened at the bottom of a page.

A special note from Product Management

Continuous Delivery v1.16 | Release to Production 8 May, 2018

We are developing our teaching and learning products toward the greater good of a holistic, next generation digital learning environment through the lens of three critical, unifying product themes: academic effectiveness, learner engagement, and education insight. By focusing on these themes, we will unify the development of our products to empower excellence in teaching and learning, inspire genuine interest, attention, and interaction in the learning process, and enable continuous improvement through accurate and deep understanding of the teaching and learning process.

In the Ally 1.16 release, we focused our development and design on academic effectiveness and learner engagement. You’ll see below that we’ve also aligned our feature list into groups based on value and benefit to you and your users.

Universal design

  • Configuration user interface
  • YouTubeTM caption checks
  • Usage tracking

Ally 1.16 | Release to production 8 May, 2018

New features, Updated features

Configuration user interface (UI)

Ally now includes a configuration UI that makes it possible to easily control the courses for which Ally is enabled, which should be especially helpful for institutions taking a more gradual roll-out approach. The following configuration options are provided:

  • See the list of courses for which Ally is currently enabled and disabled
  • Enable Ally for additional courses
  • Disable Ally for additional courses
  • Control whether Ally should automatically be enabled for new courses
  • Enable Ally for all courses at once
  • Disable Ally for all courses (just in case)

One of our technical consultants will be in touch in the next few days with instructions on how to access this configuration UI. Note that the configuration UI does not provide support for institutions that have a non-standard configuration.

More on Ally Configuration

YouTube caption checks

Ally 1.16 introduces the first of many planned steps to help increase its support for audio and video content. As part of this first step, we are now able to check HTML content (uploaded files and supported WYSIWYG content) for YouTube videos that don’t have any captions. Any videos that fail this accessibility check are then included in the institutional report. YouTube videos with auto-generated captioning are not considered to have valid captioning.

This new accessibility check does not yet contribute to the overall accessibility score. As part of a future release, these videos will be changing to top-level content items with their own accessibility scores.

Usage tracking

The detailed usage tracking introduced in the Ally 1.14 release has now also been enabled for institutions hosted from the European and Australian data centers.

Bug fixes and improvements

  • Fixed a bug that caused metadata provided through the Ally Instructor Feedback to not move over correctly when importing an existing Canvas course into a new one.
  • Files that are no longer used within a Learn course will no longer have an accessibility indicator in the Content Collection.
  • Fixed a bug that would cause the alternative format generation to fail for PDFs that contain images or paths with a 0px width or height.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the instructor feedback print view to be cut off after the first page.
  • Implemented several accessibility improvements within the Ally UI.
  • Introduced a number of improvements for determining and extracting the language of a document.
  • Introduced several updates to the Instructor Feedback guidance and screenshots.
  • Fixed a bug where Ally would throw a JavaScript error when a Portfolium item is included within a Learn Content Item.

Ally 1.15 | Release to production 27 April, 2018

New features, Updated features

Machine translated version

We are launching a trial for a new alternative format. This alternative format provides a machine translated version of the instructor’s original into a total of 50 different languages, and supports PDF, Word, Powerpoint and HTML documents.

The trial will run for the next few months and will be used to collect feedback about the use cases for the format and the quality of the translations. If you would like to be included in this trial, please contact [email protected]. For those of you that have already requested to participate, this additional alternative format will become available in the next 1-2 weeks.

Alternative format improvements

A set of improvements have been included in the alternative format generation algorithms, allowing them to pick up on content encoded into the `ActualText` properties of a tagged PDF. This should result in higher quality alternative formats, especially for PDFs that have been exported from PowerPoint documents.

Norwegian Bokmål support

Ally is now also available in Norwegian Bokmål. This includes the Ally interface, as well as the alternative formats.

Bug fixes and improvements

  • Fixed a regression that was causing a higher than expected number of failures in generating the HTML alternative format.
  • Fixed a bug in the Canvas integration that would cause the “Accessibility” column in the Files tool not to show when all content items in the folder had a 0% accessibility score.

A special note from Product Management

Continuous Delivery v1.15 | Release to Production 27 April, 2018

We are developing our teaching and learning products toward the greater good of a holistic, next generation digital learning environment through the lens of three critical, unifying product themes: academic effectiveness, learner engagement, and education insight. By focusing on these themes, we will unify the development of our products to empower excellence in teaching and learning, inspire genuine interest, attention, and interaction in the learning process, and enable continuous improvement through accurate and deep understanding of the teaching and learning process.

In the Ally 1.15 release, we focused our development and design on academic effectiveness and learner engagement. You’ll see below that we’ve also aligned our feature list into groups based on value and benefit to you and your users.

Universal design

  • Machine translated version
  • Alternative format improvements
  • Norwegian Bokmål support

Ally 1.14.2 | Release to production 19 April, 2018

Updated Features

In this Ally 1.14.2 release, we focused our development and design on academic effectiveness. You’ll see below that we’ve also aligned our feature list in to groups based on value and benefit to you and your users.

Universal design

  • Alternative format size

Alternative format size

The file size for HTML and ePub alternative formats containing images has been reduced significantly, allowing for faster downloads and easier reading on mobile devices.

Bug fixes and improvements

  • Renamed the “unknown” column to “other” in the institutional report CSV export to align with the institutional report UI.
  • Implemented several visual improvements to the “Overview” graph in the institutional report.
  • Fixed a bug that was preventing accurate tracking of the unique number of students downloading an alternative format.

Ally 1.14.1 | Release to production 11 April, 2018

Updated Features

In this Ally 1.14.1 release, we focused our development and design on academic effectiveness. You’ll see below that we’ve also aligned our feature list in to groups based on value and benefit to you and your users.

Universal design

  • Library reference validation

Library reference validation

When going through the Instructor Feedback for a scanned or untagged PDF, Ally allows the instructor to provide library reference metadata about the PDF. Several validation rules have now been added to prevent incorrect use of this form.

Bug fixes and improvements

  • Implemented several improvements to how the language of a document is detected.
  • Fixed a bug that caused certain UTF-8 characters to be read as “question mark” in the audio alternative format.
  • Fixed a bug where HTML characters were included in several tooltips within the institutional report.

Ally 1.14 | Release to production 25 March, 2018

New Features, Updated Features

In this Ally 1.14 release, we focused our development and design on academic effectiveness. You’ll see below that we’ve also aligned our feature list in to groups based on value and benefit to you and your users.

Universal design

  • All issues
  • Usage tracking

All issues

It is now possible to easily see the full list of accessibility issues that have been identified in a particular content item by selecting All issues in the instructor feedback. This also explains how much the accessibility score can be improved by fixing each issue and makes it easy to switch to a different feedback and guidance flow.

The list of all issues is also available when the instructor has completed fixing an issue and the list of remaining issues is presented.

Usage tracking

More detailed usage tracking is now available for the alternative formats:

  • How often is the alternative formats modal opened?
  • How many alternative formats are downloaded?
  • What format types are downloaded?
  • How many courses are the alternative formats used in?
  • How many unique students are using the alternative formats?

Detailed usage tracking has also been put in place for the instructor feedback:

  • How often was the instructor feedback opened?
  • What is the distribution by feedback flow type?
  • How many content items are improved through the instructor feedback?
  • How many alternative descriptions are provided through the instructor feedback?
  • How many images are marked as decorative through the instructor feedback?
  • How many library references are provided?

The collected data can currently be made available on request as a data export. This usage data will also be exposed directly in the institutional report as part of a future release.

Spike impact

Several processing and infrastructure improvements have been put in place to reduce the impact of a large number of content items and/or courses being created at once and the potential processing delays this could cause.

Bug fixes and improvements

  • Prevent the institutional CSV export from intermittently timing out and failing for institutions with a lot of LMS data.
  • Scanned documents that have been OCRd will no longer show "OCRd PDF” as an available alternative format.

A special note from Product Management

As we move into 2018, we are thinking about and developing our teaching and learning products toward the greater good of a holistic, next generation digital learning environment through the lens of three critical, unifying product themes: academic effectiveness, learner engagement, and education insight. By focusing on these themes, we will unify the development of our products to empower excellence in teaching and learning, inspire genuine interest, attention, and interaction in the learning process, and enable continuous improvement through accurate and deep understanding of the teaching and learning process.

Ally 1.13.3 | Release to production 15 March, 2018

Updated Features

Ally 1.13.3 is a maintenance release, focusing on improvements and bug fixes.

Bug fixes and improvements

  • Implemented several improvements to the tooltip that’s shown when hovering over an accessibility indicator, including removal of flickering, better positioning based on available space, etc.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the language of a document to not be extracted correctly and the audio to be generated in English instead of the source language.
  • Fixed a bug where not all text would be extracted from a tagged PDF in certain cases.
  • Fixed a bug where Ally would not correctly recognize absolutely anchored images in Microsoft Word.
  • Fixed a bug that resulted in the count for the total number of items with a particular issue in a month or year to be incorrect.
  • Fixed a bug that occasionally caused too many decimals to show for scores within the institutional report.
  • Several improvements have been made to the institutional report CSV export, including a better export file name and date formats that work better in Microsoft Excel.
  • Fixed a bug in the Canvas integration that caused the Alternative Formats button in the Files tool action bar to not be rendered correctly.

Ally 1.13.2 | Release to production 27 February 2018

New Features, Updated Features

In this Ally 1.13.2 release, we focused our development and design on academic effectiveness. You’ll see below that we’ve also aligned our feature list in to groups based on value and benefit to you and your users.

Universal design

  • Unified English Braille
  • Alternative format improvements
  • Nearly perfect files

Unified English Braille

For English documents, the Electronic Braille alternative format has been updated from the Contracted (grade 2) US English braille code to the Contracted (grade 2) Unified English Braille (UEB) braille code. Unified English Braille has become the standard braille code across all English dialects.

Alternative format improvements

Several improvements have been added to the alternative format generation algorithms. This includes improved list recognition and conversion, the removal of unnecessary HTML tags, the removal of unused elements, etc.

Nearly perfect files

Because of rounding, it was possible for files with a 99.x% accessibility score to show in the LMS as having a 100% accessibility score. To help make it clear that minor further improvements are possible, the score display has been updated to always round the score down.

Bug fixes and improvements

  • Fixed a bug in the score calculation that caused the accessibility score to be too low in certain cases.
  • Fixed a bug where Ally didn't correctly recognize that the correct language was set in certain PDFs.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the alternative formats to download icon to display incorrectly in Firefox.
  • Added several internationalization improvements for the French Ally translations.
  • Implemented various accessibility improvements in the Instructor Feedback.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented PDFs that include Type 3 fonts from receiving an accessibility score and indicator.

Ally 1.13.1 | Release to production 20 February, 2018

New Features, Updated Features, Learning Management System Integrations

In this Ally 1.13.1 release, we focused our development and design on academic effectiveness. You’ll see below that we’ve also aligned our feature list in to groups based on value and benefit to you and your users.

Universal design

  • Alternative formats
  • Blackboard Learn Learning Modules
  • Moodle and Blackboard Open LMS course copies
  • New courses

Alternative formats

The existing “Accessible versions” option has been renamed to “Alternative formats” to better represent the purpose of these alternative formats, as well as help encourage all students to explore and use these formats.

Blackboard Learn Learning Modules

Ally now supports posting alternative descriptions for images provided through the Ally instructor feedback back into the page source for the Blackboard Learn “Learning Modules” content type.

This means that all images in Learning Modules are now expected to have the Ally accessibility indicator.

Moodle and Blackboard Open LMS course copies

Ally now automatically processes the content in copied Moodle and Blackboard Open LMS courses.

Large Moodle and Blackboard Open LMS course copies can take several hours to complete, and Ally only scans the copied content items once the course copy has been fully completed.

New courses

In the last few weeks, there have been several cases where delays built up in the processing of new courses. Ally 1.13.1 contains several improvements that should greatly speed up the processing of new courses in the Learning Management System (LMS).

Bug fixes and improvements

  • Fixed a bug in the Blackboard Learn integration that prevented alternative descriptions for images to be saved through the instructor feedback in “Forums”.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented alternative descriptions for images containing a non-breaking space character from successfully saving.
  • Fixed a bug in the Instructure Canvas integration that occasionally caused the “Accessibility” column to show in the Files tool for courses that do not have Ally enabled.
  • Implemented a number of wording improvements in the descriptions for the available alternative formats.
  • A number of small accessibility improvements have been made in the course report within the institutional report.

Ally 1.13 | Release to production 12 February, 2018

New Features, Updated Features, Learning Management System Integrations

In this Ally 1.13 release, we focused our development and design on academic effectiveness. You’ll see below that we’ve also aligned our feature list in to groups based on value and benefit to you and your users.

Universal design for learning

Improved alternative formats

The conversion algorithms for the alternative formats have been updated and should bring a significant improvement in accuracy for documents with a higher accessibility score. This is achieved by incorporating more of the semantic information that’s present within the original document.

Improved instructor feedback for images

Several improvements have been introduced in the instructor feedback flow for images without an alternative description. This includes improved guidance and error messages for images with an invalid alternative description, an easier editing workflow for images that already have an alternative description, and so on.

Library reference information available to students

Students are now able to see library reference information in the alternative format modal. This library reference information can be provided by the instructor in the instructor feedback flow for scanned documents and untagged PDFs.

New language support

Ally is now available in these languages.

  • Polish
  • Norwegian
  • Catalan

Availability in these languages includes the Ally interface, as well as the alternative formats (including the audio format).

Heading check for WYSIWYG content

An additional accessibility check has been added for WYSIWYG content. This accessibility check verifies that the heading levels in the WYSIWYG content correctly follow the heading levels that are present in the Learning Management System (LMS) itself.

This check should now be part of the reported accessibility issues in the institutional report.

Decorative images

The Ally integration for Canvas has been updated to align with the new “Decorative image” functionality that was recently introduced in Canvas. This ensures that Ally is able to recognize images that have been marked as decorative in Canvas, as well as Canvas recognizing images that have been marked as decorative through Ally.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug in the Blackboard Learn Original integration where the accessibility indicators for Content Items with multiple attachments wouldn’t display properly.
  • Fixed a bug in the Web Community Manager integration where courses with a space in the URL would not be checked for accessibility issues.
  • The CSV export in the institutional report will now correctly mark the HTML accessibility checks that succeeded as a “1”.
  • Prevent the “This image does not have an alternative description” issue from being listed in the institutional report for images that have been marked as decorative.

Ally 1.12.3 | Release to production 6 February 2018

Updated Features, Instructure Canvas Integration

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug that prevented the alternative format download option and accessibility indicator from displaying for content items linked from WYSIWYG content (e.g., Page, Syllabus). This was caused by a display change in the latest Instructure Canvas release.
  • Fixed a bug where the instructor feedback guidance on how to generate a tagged PDF from Powerpoint® 2016 on Microsoft® Windows® did not load correctly.

Ally 1.12.2 | Release to production 31 January, 2018

Updated Features

Moodle Performance

A number of changes have been introduced in the Moodle and Blackboard Open LMS integrations that significantly improve performance, especially for larger installations. These performance improvements include both the initial onboarding process, as well as the rendering of the accessibility indicators and alternative formats in courses.

Improved CSV Export

Within the Institutional Report CSV export, WYSIWYG content data is now split out by WISYWIG type (e.g., Page, Syllabus, etc.), making it easier to understand the content type distribution within courses.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a bug where items that were improved through the Ally instructor feedback and then deleted from the course would still be included in the institutional report
  • Fixed a bug where the correct content type would not be shown when listing content items with a specific issue in the institutional report

Ally 1.12.1 | Release to production 16 January, 2018

New Features, Updated Features, LMS Integrations

Alternative descriptions

Alternative descriptions for images provided through the Ally instructor feedback are now also pushed back into the source of the context in which the image is used.

For Blackboard Learn, this is currently available for:

  • Content Item
  • Web Link
  • Content Folder
  • Course Link
  • File

For Instructure Canvas, this is currently available for:

  • Page
  • Announcement
  • Assignment
  • Discussion Topic
  • Syllabus
  • Quiz

Additional areas will be added as new LMS REST APIs become available.

Course copy

Any metadata provided through the Ally instructor feedback that can not be pushed back into the LMS (e.g., library reference) will now automatically be copied over when a course is copied.

WYSIWYG content reporting

The WYSIWYG content reporting feature announced as part of Ally 1.12 (Ally 1.12 announcement) has now been enabled for all Instructure Canvas institutions.

Therefore, any new or updated WYSIWYG content will immediately be reflected in the institutional report. We will also be processing existing WYSIWYG content in existing courses in the background, but it’s expected that this will take several weeks to complete given the large number of items that need to be onboarded.

Instructor feedback wording improvements

Several wording improvements have been introduced in the various instructor feedback flows. These improvements cover the different languages in which Ally is available.