Archived Release Notes Ally 2019

Release Notes for Ally - 2019

Ally 1.37 | Release to production 25 December 2019

New features, Updated features

Usage Reports

Ally 1.37 introduces the ability to download an Ally Usage report directly from the institutional report. An additional Usage tab is now available in the institutional report, allowing for a date range to be selected and the usage report for that date range to be downloaded as an Excel file.

A usage report contains the following usage data about the alternative formats:

How often has the alternative formats modal been triggered?
How many alternative formats have been triggered?
How often has triggering the alternative formats model led to an alternative format download?
How often has each alternative format type been downloaded?
In how many courses have alternative formats been downloaded?
In which courses have alternative formats been downloaded (and how many per course)?
What is the evolution of the alternative format modal triggers and alternative format downloads over time (by week)?

Usage reports also contain the following usage data about the instructor feedback:

How often has the instructor feedback been triggered?
How many content improvements have been made directly through the instructor feedback?
How often has triggering the instructor feedback led to an immediate improvement of the content item through the instructor feedback?
In how many courses have improvements been made through the instructor feedback?
In which courses have improvements been made through the instructor feedback (and how many per course)?
What is the evolution of the instructor feedback triggers and instructor feedback improvements over time (by week)?

Lastly, usage reports also include a Data tab that contains the full list of raw usage events that have been captured, and can be used to create additional custom visualizations.

Feature Flags

Blackboard Ally is increasingly moving to feature flags as part of its development approach, allowing institutions to decide when to opt in or out of a particular feature. To help support this, a new Features tab is now available in the Ally Configuration UI. This Features tab lists all of the optional features that are available for your integration.

Examples of available optional features are the Translated Version alternative format, the ability to launch the instructor feedback from the institutional report, and so on. They can easily be enabled or disabled at any point in time, and more optional features will be added over time.

Ally for Websites Alternative Formats

The Ally for Websites integration now allows for specific HTML elements to be excluded from the alternative formats. Excluding an element can be achieved by adding the `data-ally-exclude` attribute to the element.

Next to Ally already limiting the content of the alternative formats to the `<main>` element or the element containing the `role=”main”` attribute, this new attribute provides some additional control on which page elements should be included or excluded from the generated alternative formats.

Ally 1.37 bug fixes and improvements

The accessibility check for the presence of headings in Tagged PDFs has been expanded to also recognize `H` tags as a valid heading.
Implemented several usability improvements in the Configuration UI based on the feedback from usability testing sessions.
Improved the Print View in the instructor feedback to not include icons that are not relevant when printing the instructor feedback guidance.
Fixed several bugs in the content preview component of the instructor feedback that occurred when closing and re-opening the instructor feedback for the same content item without refreshing the page.
Fixed a bug that occasionally caused updates to image descriptions through the instructor feedback to fail.
Fixed a bug in the Blackboard Learn integration that occasionally caused the alternative formats for content in a Learning Module to not be available.
Fixed a bug in the Blackboard Learn integration that would occasionally cause the Ally accessibility indicator to overlap with the file name.
Added support for courses with non-standard URLs because of their institutional hierarchy association in the Blackboard Learn integration.

Ally 1.35.6 | Release to production 7 November 2019

Blackboard Learn integration, D2L Brightspace integration, Updated features

Blackboard Learn Ultra integration

The Blackboard Learn Ultra integration has been improved to show the alternative formats and instructor feedback indicators for attachments in Ultra documents and tests.

Additional improvements, such as showing the alternative formats and instructor feedback indicators in the Course Outline, are scheduled to be included in the February Learn SaaS release.

Ally 1.35.6 bug fixes and improvements

Fixed a bug that occasionally caused uploading a fixed version through the instructor feedback to fail.
Fixed a bug that caused the “Request Help” email feature to show when it was not enabled in the Ally Configuration UI.
Fixed a bug in the D2L Brightspace integration that caused clicking a file in the course accessibility report to result in a 404.
Fixed a bug in the Blackboard Learn integration that prevented the more prominent Alternative Formats icon from showing in Learning Modules.
Fixed a bug that caused the parsing of certain documents containing long ISBN numbers to fail.

Ally 1.35.3 | Release to production 4 October 2019

Updated Features

Ally 1.35.3 bug fixes and improvements

Fixed a bug that caused the institutional report and course accessibility report to not load in IE11
Fixed a bug in the Blackboard Learn Ultra integration that caused a link to an Ultra document in the course accessibility report to redirect to the original course view instead of the Ultra course view
Improved the accessibility of the severity icons in the course accessibility report

Ally 1.34.2 | Release to production 23 August 2019

Updated Features

Course accessibility report

Fixed a bug in the course accessibility report that ensures that instructors aren’t able to access the report in courses for which Ally has been disabled through the Ally Configuration UI.

Ally 1.34.2 bug fixes and improvements

Re-introduced Alternative Formats in the content menu in the Content Collection page for the Blackboard Learn integration. Note that this option is only available for content that’s attached in the course and visible to students.

Ally 1.33 | Release to production 2 July 2019

New Features, Updated Features

D2L BrightSpace integration

We are extremely proud to announce that Blackboard Ally is now available for D2L BrightSpace. Ally is seamlessly integrated into the D2L BrightSpace interface and provides the same functionality as the other Ally for LMS integrations, with alternative formats and instructor feedback being available for uploaded files such as PDF, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and Images.

Next to these different file types, the institutional report also contains the results of checking the following WYSIWYG content types for accessibility issues:

File topics
Quiz topics
External link topics
Discussion topics
Modules

It may take up to July 25 for the integration to be available in D2L BrightSpace production environments, depending on which monthly release wave the environment is on.

Student alternative formats

Alternative formats panel

Instructor accessibility score

Instructor feedback panel

Administrator institutional report

More prominent alternative formats

In the last year alone, students have downloaded more than 2 million alternative formats through Ally. This has been a great confirmation of the Universal Design for Learning principles that Ally was designed with and how improved accessibility and choice can benefit all learners. Therefore, we are making the “Alternative Format” option more prominent to allow students to more easily find the alternative formats and access them more quickly.

Given that these more prominent Alternative Format icons affect the main LMS UI, we are doing a soft release of this feature. Institutions that want to enable the more prominent alternative formats straight away can request this through a Behind The Blackboard ticket. On August 1, all institutions will automatically be moved to the more prominent alternative formats, although it is possible to request a later date as well through a Behind The Blackboard ticket.

This is an overview of how the more prominent alternative formats are displayed in the different LMSs:

Blackboard Learn: The Alternative Formats icon has been removed from the content dropdown and is now available as a single click next to the original file name.
Blackboard Open LMS and Moodle: The Alternative Formats icon replaces the “Download” dropdown and is available as a single click next to the original file name.
Instructure Canvas: The dropdown icon next to the original file name has been made more prominent. There are multiple actions that can be taken on a file (e.g., preview), so the dropdown is still in place to group those various actions and prevent the screen from becoming too cluttered.
D2L BrightSpace: The Alternative Formats icon is available as a single click from the Table of Contents and the individual content pages.

Usage tracking

Detailed usage tracking is now available for the Ally for Websites and Ally for Web Community Manager integrations. The following (anonymous) usage data is tracked for the alternative formats:

How often is the alternative formats modal opened?
How many alternative formats are downloaded?
What alternative format types are downloaded?
In which (sub)domains or sections have alternative formats been downloaded?

In the Ally for Web Community Manager integration, the following content creator feedback is tracked as well:

How often is the content creator feedback opened?
How many content items are improved through the content creator feedback?
In which sections have improvements been made through the content creator feedback?

Similar to the Ally for LMS integrations, a usage report can be requested through a Behind The Blackboard support ticket. As part of our 2019 roadmap, this data will be exposed directly in the Ally report as well.

Ally 1.31 | Release to production 18 June 2019

New Features, Updated Features

Configuration UI in Blackboard Learn

The Ally Configuration UI is now available in the Blackboard Learn Administrator Panel, providing easier access to the various Ally configuration options and the ability to enable/disable Ally for individual courses.

Note that this requires the Blackboard Learn SaaS 3700.3.0 release (released to production on June 6 2019). It will be available for self-hosted and managed hosted Blackboard Learn institutions as of the Blackboard Learn Q4 2019 release.

Also note that Blackboard Learn doesn’t always automatically pick up on this new link when upgrading to this release. If that’s the case, you can toggle the availability of the Ally Building Block to Off and then to On again. At that point, the Ally Configuration link will become available.

ePub alternative format

The ePub alternative format generation algorithm has been significantly improved. This results in a much smaller file size, and should greatly benefit mobile usage of the ePub alternative format.

Ally LTI Tools in Canvas

The Ally LTI cartridge for the Institutional Report and Configuration UI in the Canvas integration has been updated to ensure that these tools are no longer visible in areas where instructors can select known LTI tools (e.g., “external module” or “external tool submission type”). To utilize these new LTI cartridges, the existing Ally Institutional Report and Ally Configuration UI LTI tools need to be removed and re-added using the existing installation instructions.

Ally 1.31 bug fixes and improvements

Additional configuration options have been added to the Ally for Websites crawler to allow the frequency of the automated recrawls to be increased or decreased.
The months in the Ally Institutional Report have been fully localized.
The audio alternative format now distinguishes between ordered and unordered lists. Ordered lists will be announced as “Begin numbered list”, and unordered lists will be announced as “Begin bulleted list”.
Decorative images will no longer be announced in the audio alternative format.
Fixed a bug in the “This document has no headings” check for Word documents to prevent empty paragraphs from contributing to the minimum document length threshold.
Fixed a bug that caused the incorrect severity label to be used for certain issues in the institutional report CSV export.

Ally 1.27.2 | Release to production 14 March 2019

Updated Features, Blackboard Learn Integration

Ally 1.27.2 bug fixes and improvements

Fixed a bug in the Blackboard Learn integration that caused a small number of courses with files to be listed in the CSV export as not having files.

Ally 1.25 | Release to production 4 February 2019

New Features, Updated Features, WCM Integration, Blackboard Learn Integration

Alternative Formats for Web Community Manager

The Ally Alternative Formats are now available for the Web Community Manager integration. Documents embedded in Web Community Manager will show an Alternative Formats icon, giving access to the following Alternative Formats for anyone visiting the website:

OCR’d version (for scanned documents)
Tagged PDF (for Word, Powerpoint and OpenOffice/LibreOffice files)
Mobile-friendly HTML
Audio
ePub
Electronic Braille
Translated Version

This should now be available for all Web Community Manager schools that have Ally integrated.

Content Feedback for Web Community Manager

The Ally content creator feedback is now also available for the Web Community Manager integration. When accessing the Ally accessibility report for a site or section, the accessibility indicator for individual content items can be clicked to launch the Ally feedback. This also includes the “Preview” functionality that was made available as part of the Ally 1.24 release. Fixes can be provided directly through the Ally feedback and will be posted back into Web Community Manager.

This should now be available for all Web Community Manager schools that have Ally integrated.