Release Notes for Ally - 2021

Ally 2.0 | Release to production 16 December 2021

New features, Learn integration, Moodle integration, D2L Integration, Canvas Integration

Instructor Feedback for WYSIWYG content

We're excited to announce that Ally now supports Instructor Feedback for WYSIWYG content!

In this first release of Instructor Feedback for WYSIWYG content, we're expanding Ally's scanning and feedback to now include support for content created in the course using your LMS content editor (WYSIWYG content).

Ally score appears above the content editor toolbar on the right of the screen.

In addition to the feedback and guidance you're familiar with for other content/document types - we've added some new features that make it quicker and easier than ever to improve the accessibility of your course content including:

Live scoring and flagging of accessibility issues as content is created and edited

Automatic suggestions and batch remediation to more quickly fix issues at scale

More on WYSIWYG Accessibility

This feature is now available for Blackboard Learn Ultra, Blackboard Learn Original, Instructure Canvas, D2L Brightspace, Moodle/OpenLMS, and  Moodle with Atto Editor. This feature is targeted to be introduced in a future release for Schoology.

This feature is disabled by default. To enable Instructor Feedback for WYSIWYG content administrators can navigate to the Ally Configuration UI and go to the Features tab.

In future releases we'll be improving the visibility of the score indicator in view mode, introducing support for other tools in the LMS, and more deeply integrating into the course and institutional reporting capabilities.

A special thank you goes out to our user group and community of beta testers that provided feedback during the development of these features - thank you!

Incorrect Language / No Set Language

Ally now provides feedback guidance for Word, Power Point, and PDF documents that have no set language or an incorrectly set language.

Panel showing buttons to find out what this issue means and how to fix it. As well as a place to upload a new document.

Ally 1.57 | Release to production 24 March 2021

New features, Updated features, Instructure Canvas

Course Accessibility Report data is now available in the Usage Report

Ally administrators are now able view usage data for the Course Accessibility Report as part of the Usage Report. Within the Instructor Feedback Launches and Instructor Feedback Weekly data tabs, admins can see how many times the Course Accessibility Report has been launched along with the Instructor Feedback launch and total number of fixes data to better track overall engagement.

Departmental report is now searchable

Admins are now able to search through the list of departments available on the Directory tab within the Institutional report to facilitate faster searching and reporting when looking for specific departments.

Ally 1.57 bug fixes & improvements

  • Improved our ElasticSearch infrastructure to implement data encryption-at-rest as well as allow for the ability to search the Ally Configuration Courses tab for Course IDs containing more than 10 characters.
  • Improved lists and headings detection within Arabic documents to improve the overall quality of the Alternative Formats.
  • Added support for the new Canvas file preview functionality to address an issue where the Ally indicators overlapped with the new Canvas icon.
  • Fixed an accessibility bug that prevented keyboard navigation to the Remove from Image button when editing and removing alternative text from an image in the Instructor Feedback.

Ally 1.55.1 | Release to production 25 February 2021

New features, Updated features

Ally in Hebrew

As part of our continued efforts to support universal design and equitable access around the world, Ally 1.55.1 makes the Ally User Interface available in Hebrew. There is now Hebrew support to the Ally institutional report, configuration UI, alternative formats modal, instructor feedback and course accessibility report, including full right-to-left support for all of these.

The Ally alternative formats are not yet available in Hebrew. This will be made available in a future release.

Ally 1.55.1 bug fixes & improvements

  • Fixed a bug where in some cases when default help is enabled, clicking the help link within the Alternative Formats window also submitted the form.
  • Fixed a bug where files containing lists were not rendered properly in ePub or Beeline alternative formats for right-to-left language documents.

Ally 1.55 | Release to production 18 February 2021

New features, Updated features

Department score data now available in the CSV export

As part of the Ally 1.55 release, department score data is now available when you export a CSV from the Institutional report. LMS administrators can use the CSV export to easily compare across departments by accessibility score, amount of content, number of courses. and accessibility issues. When downloading and opening the CSV export zip package, you will now see a departments_months, departments_terms and departments_years CSV file available to analyze progress by department over time.

Ally 1.55 bug fixes & improvements

  • Improved the ePub alternative format to make ePub titles more consistent by using the title from the original file or the filename of the original file when a title is not available.
  • Improved the handling and communication of failures that occur when uploading updated content back through the Instructor Feedback panel.