Archived Release Notes Ally 2019

Ally 1.36 | Release to production 2 December 2019

New features, Updated features

Ally for Websites content feedback

The Ally content feedback component is now available for Ally for Websites. In the Ally for Websites accessibility report, the score indicators for PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoint documents and Images can be clicked to launch the feedback component, which contains information about:

• What accessibility issues have been identified in the content item
• A preview of the content item and highlights that show where specific issues can be found in the document
• Documentation on what each issue means
• Detailed guidance on how to fix an issue
• A link to where the content can be found on the website

This feedback component will make it much easier for content creators to understand how accessible a content item is, what its issues are and how it can be made more accessible.

More on how to use the feedback to improve your content

D2L Brightspace institutional hierarchy

The D2L Brightspace integration has been expanded to include the institutional hierarchy information for a course under the Department id and Department name columns in the courses.csv CSV export in the institutional report. This institutional hierarchy information is based on the `Department` organizational units that have been configured within Brightspace. This enables the calculation of the Ally score for each department in the institutional hierarchy through a tool like Excel, and serves as part of the foundational work to support native reporting by institutional hierarchy in the institutional report as part of our roadmap.

This feature requires an additional permission for the Ally API user. This can be configured under `Security > Roles and Permissions` by enabling the `Course Management Info` > `See Course Info: Enable for Course Offering` permission for the Ally API user.

Library reference

A Library Reference could already be provided by instructors for scanned documents and untagged PDFs as a way to provide additional metadata for files where the instructor doesn’t have access to an original and has no other means of improving the accessibility of the file. Ally 1.36 introduces the ability for instructors to provide a Library Reference for all other PDFs.

Ally 1.36 bug fixes and improvements

• Improved the hover and focus styles of the Ally for Websites alternative formats button.
• Improved the Moodle integration to automatically accept the user policy for the Ally API user.
• Images embedded in the header or footer of a Word document are now excluded from the alternative description check.
• Fixed a bug that caused specific instructor feedback guidance fragments to not be translated correctly.
• Improved the handling of replacing a file with a different file type through the Ally instructor feedback.

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 1.35.1 | Release to production 19 September 2019

Updated Features

Canvas Blueprint Courses

The Ally 1.35.1 release introduces support for Canvas Blueprint courses. Alternative descriptions for images and other accessibility metadata set through the Ally instructor feedback in the blueprint course will now be copied over correctly to any courses created from the blueprint.

Ally support for Canvas Blueprint Courses requires the `Courses - add / edit / delete` permission to be assigned to the Ally REST API user.

Ally 1.35.1 bug fixes and improvements

• Improved support for special characters and diacritics in the OCRd alternative format
• Improved the display of the “large ribbon” for the Ally for Websites alternative formats to be smaller on a mobile device
• Fixed a bug in the D2L Brightspace integration that caused the student enrollment count to not synchronize correctly for large courses
• Added the “language” attribute to the ePub alternative format
• Fixed a bug in the Canvas integration that occasionally caused the alternative formats modal to freeze the screen
• Implemented several positioning improvements for the alternative formats icon and the accessibility indicator in the Moodle integration
• Implemented several accessibility improvements in the alternative formats modal dialog

Ally 1.34.1 | Release to production 22 August 2019

Updated Features

D2L Brightspace student count

Ally 1.34.1 fixes a bug in the D2L Brightspace integration that caused the student count for a course to always be “0” in the institutional report. This fix does require an additional permission for the Blackboard Ally REST role though.

The following steps should be followed to configure this:

1. Go to Security and Roles and Permissions in the administrator menu.
2. Add the following extra permissions under Users to the Blackboard Ally REST role:
   1. View User Enrollments
   2. Search For Student

      If your institution uses a different / custom role for students, select “Search For ” instead.

Ally will only ever retrieve the student count, and not any individual enrollments or individual student information.

Ally 1.34.1 bug fixes & improvements

• Fixed a bug in the Canvas integration that caused the alternative format download icon to not be visible for files in the Announcements and Discussions tools.

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.

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:

1. 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.
   
2. 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.
   
3. 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.
   
4. 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.