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Ally 2.9.3 | Release to production: April 06, 2024
Bug Fixes and improvements
- Fixed an issue where the Ally Institutional Report was not displaying the full list of issues when a department, a course, or a domain (in Ally for Web) has more than 1000 issues. This prevented administrators from being able to correctly review and identify the priorities for fixing accessibility issues flagged by Ally.
Ally 2.8.2 | Release to production: February 22, 2024
Bug Fixes and improvements
- Fixed an issue where in some cases the Domain Accessibility Report was not loading correctly and prevented administrators from seeing a list of other issues flagged by Ally when drilling down into the report.
Ally 2.8.0 | Release to production: February 9, 2024
Course Accessibility Report Instructor Feedback Improvements
Ally 2.8.0 brings several fixes and improvements to the Instructor Feedback launched from the Course Accessibility Report to help instructors that frequently use it as a starting point to address issues within their course. These improvements aim to further streamline instructor workflows as they look to quickly identify low scoring content or content with the easiest issues to fix.
Image 1: Ally Course Accessibility Report
Increased visibility into what is happening behind the scenes for WYSIWYG content
When instructors launch the Ally Instructor Feeback for WYSIWYG content from the Course Accessibility Report, Ally will now briefly display a message alerting users that Ally is updating the score to account for the latest updates. This improvement helps to ensure that the score is always up to date and addresses previous confusion around scores jumping depending on where and when it was viewed.
Image 2: “Updating Ally score” alert in the Instructor Feedback window
Bug Fixes and Other Improvements:
- Fixed an issue in which the Indicate Image is Decorative option was not updating the file or the score in WYSIWYG content when performed from the Course Accessibility Report.
- Fixed an issue in which the Add Image Description option was not correctly updating the alternative text or the score in WYSIWYG content when performed from the Course Accessibility Report.
- Fixed an issue in which the Instructor Feedback within the Course Accessibility Report was not displaying the correct score for files that only contained one issue.
- Fixed an issue in which Ally was not displaying the correct number of issues after launching into the Instructor Feedback from the Course Accessibility Report.
- Fixed an issue where the highlighting within the Ally Instructor feedback content preview was only pointing to one video despite Ally flagging multiple videos without captions within WYSIWYG content.
Ally 2.7.14 | Release to production: February 1, 2024
Improved API endpoints for reporting tools
As a follow-up to the initial release in Ally 2.7.7, the Ally API endpoints for reporting tools have been improved to allow for better handling of larger datasets and clearer communication of statuses for administrators looking to integrate Ally data with reporting tools like Power BI, Tableau, Excel or customized web applications.
These improvements help to further streamline the process for stakeholders building custom reports and dashboards outside of the Ally Institutional Report to enable more data-driven decision making throughout the institution.
Image 1: Example custom PowerBI dashboard
Improvements include:
- When Ally needs to prepare larger datasets, the Ally API now responds with the status code 202 (Processing) to inform users that they will need to wait until the data is ready to avoid timeout issues. When the data is ready, the API will respond with the code 200 (Successful).
- The total number of filtered records has also been added to the metadata. This will help users confirm that the filtering options are working as expected (while keeping in line with the 10,000-records response limit per endpoint).
Additional information about the API for reporting, including configuration examples, is available in the updated Integrate Ally's API with an External Reporting Tool help page.
Updated technical documentation around the API endpoints is also available in the Reporting API Endpoints help page.
Ally 2.7.9 | Release to production: October 18, 2023
Bugs fixes and improvements
- Fixed an issue related to the recent implementation of the session timeout that was causing generic errors to display in the browser console while accessing the Institutional Report.
Ally 2.7.7 | Release to production: September 6, 2023
New features
API endpoints for reporting tools
Administrators can now integrate their Ally data into reporting tools and applications like Power BI, Tableau, or even Microsoft Excel more seamlessly than before, using two new private Ally API endpoints for reporting. This API provides two GET endpoints that allow Administrators to quickly build reports or dashboards and retrieve information on accessibility scores and issues.
Instead of reconfiguring dashboards each time a new CSV export is available, these new endpoints allow Administrators to configure a report once and refresh the data at 15-minute intervals to update dashboards in the preferred reporting tool. Administrators can obtain all the credentials needed to configure the data in the external reporting tool from the Institutional Report.
Additional information about the API for reporting, including configuration examples, is available in the Integrate Ally's API with an External Reporting Tool help page. Technical documentation around the new API endpoints is also available in the Reporting API Endpoints help page.
Endpoints included in the API for reporting are private endpoints and do not come with a deprecation policy at this time. Anthology Ally may change or update these endpoints depending on our roadmap or future releases.
Bug Fixes and improvements
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Fixed an accessibility issue where controls in the Ally configuration were not properly announced as control groups by screen readers.
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Fixed an accessibility issue where the file drop area in the Ally Instructor Feedback did not have descriptive text for screen readers.
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Added a session timeout to the Ally Report for Ally for Websites that prevents unwanted access when the report is left unattended or there is no activity. (The timeout is triggered after 900 seconds of inactivity and signs out the user automatically.)
Ally 2.7.5 | Release to production: August 10, 2023
Bugs fixes and improvements
- Fixed an accessibility issue where a decorative image from the Ally instructor feedback was not hidden from screen readers.
Ally 2.7.4 | Release to production: July 26, 2023
New features
Audio Alternative Format character limit increased
Ally now supports files with up to 200,000 characters when downloading the Audio Alternative Format.
Improvements and bug fixing
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Fixed an accessibility issue where visually grouped controls in the Instructor Feedback were not being grouped correctly.
Ally 2.6.8 | Release to production: May 24, 2023
Improvements and bug fixing
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Fixed an issue that was preventing administrators from accessing the Ally for Websites Accessibility Report using the Microsoft Single Sign-On option.
Ally 2.6.7 | Release to production: May 17, 2023
Improvements and bug fixing
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Improved the Scanning on Demand queuing system with an update that ensures that scans stuck for more than twelve hours will be ignored. This allows administrators to trigger scans without waiting for stuck scans to be finished.
Ally 2.6.6 | Release to production: June 6, 2023
Improvements and bug fixing
As part of our efforts to support universal design and equitable access around the world, Ally now supports the User Interface in the Chinese Traditional language (zh-TW). Chinese Traditional is now available in Ally Institutional Report, configuration UI, Alternative Formats modal, Instructor Feedback, and Course Accessibility Report.
This does not represent changes in the current language support in other Ally features.
Ally 2.6.2 | Release to production: March 29, 2023
Improvements and bug fixing
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The Braille Alternative Format has been upgraded to improve overall performance and incorporate general Braille table improvements.
Ally 2.6.0 Release to production: March 8, 2023
Improvements and bug fixing
- Fixed an issue in Ally for Websites where, in some cases, admins could not trigger manual scans on domains when scheduled scans had already been executed.
- Fixed an issue in Ally for Websites where the preview of the website was not displayed in the Instructor Feedback.
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Ally 2.5.9 | Release to production: March 1, 2023
Updated features
Identification and scoring of Microsoft Office and LibreOffice Password-protected files
Password-protected Microsoft Office and LibreOffice documents are now identified and scored by Ally. When you upload a password-protected document, Ally will flag it with a 0% score. This will increase the instructor's awareness to update and make the content available to learners without any blockers.
This is a go-forward change that only affects the score of newly added or updated password-protected Office content after this release.
As part of future releases, we will incorporate additional guidance and feedback for these files into the Instructor Feedback.
Translated Version Alternative Format character limit increased
Ally now supports files with up to 60,000 characters when downloading the Translated Version Alternative Format.
Ally 2.5.7 | Release to production: February 14, 2023
Updated features
On-Demand Domain Scan is now available in Ally for Web
Ally for Web administrators can now trigger scans of web domains directly from the Ally Accessibility report using the new Crawl Domain button. With this feature, institutions can trigger a crawl "on-demand" in between the normally scheduled crawls —to check recent content or section updates— to provide greater flexibility when tracking and fixing content issues.
After clicking Crawl Domain, administrators can see the scan progress or cancel the scan at any time.
Administrators will be notified through the user interface while the report is being updated.
Scheduled automated scans will continue to run as intended, as soon as the on-demand scan is completed.
For more information, please review the Scan on Demand documentation on the Ally for Web help page.
If you'd like to provide additional feedback regarding the new Scan on Demand feature for Ally for Websites, please fill out this short anonymous survey.
Ally 2.4.4 | Release to production 26 October 2022
Updated features
Bug fixes and improvements
- The Overview within the Institutional Report displays information from the first month of recorded Ally data, containing out-of-date information. This issue has been fixed.
Ally 2.4.3 | Release to production 19 October 2022
Updated features
We have made navigation improvements in the Institutional Report graph. As of now, the dropdown button is highlighted when you navigate through the graph using the keyboard:
Ally 2.4.2 | Release to production 12 October 2022
Updated features
Ally 2.4.2 Bug fixes and improvements
- We have made navigation and style improvements in the Institutional Report graph. Now the information for each period is displayed when you navigate through the graph using the keyboard:
- There was an issue in scheduled crawling in Ally for Web where the scheduled configuration was overridden by the default configuration. This issue has been fixed.
Ally 2.4.1 | Release to production 5 October 2022
Updated features
Ally 2.4.1 bug fixes and improvements
- An issue accessing the videos displayed in the ally.ac website is now fixed.
Ally 2.2.9 | Release to production 29 June 2022
Updated features
Ally 2.2.9 bug fixes and improvements
- DNS resolution can be executed using an application-based DNS, where wildcards can be resolved correctly.
Ally 2.2.3 | Release to production 25 May 2022
New features
Broken Links (Ally for Web)
With this latest release, Ally now provides feedback and guidance for HTML content containing broken links which surface when content linked to is moved or removed.
For more information about this issue, visit the broken links help page.
Ally 2.1.1 | Release to production 10 March 2022
Updated features
Ally 2.1.1 bug fixes and improvements
- Added English (New Zealand), English (South African), English (Welsh), and Hindi language support for audio alternative formats.
Ally 2.0.7/2.0.8 | Release to production 11 February 2022
Updated features
Ally 2.0.7/2.0.8 bug fixes and improvements
- The institutional report graph design has been refreshed to improve readability, accessibility, and responsiveness.
More about the Accessibility Score graph
Ally 2.0.6 | Release to production 3 February 2022
Updated features
Ally 2.0.6 bug fixes & improvements
- Added Irish (ga), Marathi (mr), Portuguese (Portugal) (pt-PT), and Punjabi (pa) language support for translated alternative formats.
Ally 2.0.4 | Release to production 26 January 2022
Updated features
Ally 2.0.4 bug fixes & improvements
- Improved consistency of score data displayed in the institutional report and instructor feedback.
Ally 1.62.8 | Release to production 4 November 2021
Ally 1.62.8 bug fixes & improvements
- Improved performance and language support for audio (MP3) alternative formats.
Ally 1.62.6 | Release to production 14 October 2021
Ally 1.62.6 bug fixes & improvements
- Improved support for reporting on large domains with many files.
Ally 1.62.2 | Release to production 22 September 2021
Ally 1.62.2 bug fixes & improvements
- Improved data quality for usage reports, available in the Institution Report for administrators.
This improvement modifies the selectable days in the interface to provide data ending in the 1-2 days previous from the current day, based on your country/region.
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Improved academic year titles for institutions whose academic term starts in January and ends in the same year. For example, if an academic term starts on January 1st 2021 and ends the same year, the title will now show: "2021".
Ally 1.61.0 | Release to production 5 August 2021
Ally 1.61.0 bug fixes & improvements
- Improved scoring rules for headings where some elements are positioned off-screen.
Ally 1.60, 1.60.1 | Release to production 17 June 2021
Ally 1.60, 1.60.1 bug fixes & improvements
- Minor language update to tooltips when viewing the directory tab of the course accessibility report.
Ally 1.59 | Release to production 15 April 2021
Ally for Web Access Control Microsoft Authentication
The Ally 1.52 release introduced Access Control for Ally for Websites, which allows your Ally for Websites administrator to delegate specific access to the Accessibility report with a Google Authentication option. This latest release adds Microsoft as an authentication option to allow users to login using their organizational email if they do not wish to use a Google address. The super administrator is still able to setup the domain groups and users as normal, however a new user can now choose which authentication mechanism best meets their needs.
As a reminder, access control is an optional feature as administrators are still able to login with the provided LTI Key and Secret. If you don't opt to use the Access Control feature, you may still login to the Accessibility report as you normally would.
Ally 1.59 bug fixes & improvements
- Fixed a bug where in some cases OCRed Alternative formats were downloading with random characters included in the document text.
Ally 1.58 | Release to production 1 April 2021
Ally 1.58 bug fixes & improvements
- Improved the Translated Version alternative format to include the word "translated" in the downloaded filename to distinguish between the Translated Version alternative format and the HTML alternative format. For example, downloading the Spanish Translated Version for a file named Van Gogh.docx will result in Van Gogh - Translated - es.html.
Ally 1.57 | Release to production 24 March 2021
Ally 1.57 bug fixes & improvements
- Improved lists and headings detection within Arabic documents to improve the overall quality of the Alternative Formats.
Ally 1.55.2 | Release to production 4 March 2021
Ally 1.55.2 bug fixes & improvements
- Fixed an accessibility issue to improve the color contrast ratio of the Terms of Use text within the Alternative Formats modal window.
- Fixed a bug where the filename was not aligned properly within the Alternative Formats modal window when downloading formats for right-to-left language documents.
Ally 1.55.1 | Release to production 25 February 2021
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 accessibility report, configuration UI, alternative formats modal, and feedback panel, 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
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.
Ally 1.54.3 | Release to production 11 February 2021
Ally 1.54.3 bug fixes & improvements
- Improved the underlying crawler structure in Ally for Web. The crawl can now be set on the backend to skip a pre-defined set of domains. This allows the Ally crawl to avoid potentially problematic domains to prevent crawling failures.
- Fixed a bug where page previews and HTML guidance couldn't load when launching the feedback for certain web pages within the Accessibility Report.
- Improved the labeling of form fields within the Request Help function of the Alternative Formats window.
- Fixed a bug where Ally's accessibility check for headings did not account for non-breaking spaces within the document.
Ally 1.54.2 | Release to production 4 February 2021
Ally 1.54.2 bug fixes & improvements
- Fixed an accessibility issue where zooming in on the Feedback panel or using a device with a small display resolution (of 600 px or less) causes the header and footer to hide the content being displayed to the user.
Ally 1.54.1 | Release to production 28 January 2021
Links without discernible text
We are continuing to roll out HTML feedback flows to help you improve your webpage content. With this latest release, Ally now provides feedback and guidance for HTML content containing links that do not have discernible or meaningful text which can make navigation confusing and create issues for screen reader users.
For more information about this issue, visit the Links with missing text help page.
Ally 1.54.1 bug fixes & improvements
- Fixed a bug where Ally would incorrectly flag a contrast issue in certain PDF files with Type3 fonts.
Ally 1.54 | Release to production 21 January 2021
Ally 1.54 bug fixes & improvements
- Fixed a bug in Ally for Web Access Control that resulted in newly created domain groupings showing as having 0 domains applied despite being saved correctly by the admin.
Ally 1.52 | Release to production 4 December 2020
Ally for Websites Access Control
The Ally 1.52 release introduces Access Control for Ally for Websites, which allows your Ally for Websites administrator to delegate specific access to the Accessibility report. With these additional configuration options, administrators are able to create users with an email address and assign them to specific domain groupings to limit access to specific (sub)domains based on the relevant content they need to see. Administrators can choose to allow new users access to everything, which includes the entire report and configuration options, or be limited to partial access based on the Domain Groups specified for that user. Once a user account is created, new users are able to link this email address to a Google account to sign in to the report via the new Google authentication option on the report launch landing page. Logging into the report will allow them to go into an Accessibility report for their domain group or groups depending on how many were assigned.
Access control is an optional feature as administrators are still able to login with the provided LTI Key and Secret. If you do not opt to use the Access Control feature you may still login to the Accessibility report as you normally would.
As part of a future release, we will be taking a look at additional authentication options beyond Google as a next step.
Ally for Websites HTML Feedback and Guidance
The Ally 1.52 release also introduces the first set of feedback and guidance information for HTML specific issues found on your webpages. These feedback flows include guidance for webpages that contain text with insufficient contrast and webpages that contain images that are missing a description.
This complements the feedback and guidance that was already available for file content such as PDFs, Word documents and PowerPoint documents. Additionally, this complements the page preview function of the feedback component that was released in Ally 1.47. Ally for Websites now provides feedback and highlighting for most content types, which makes it significantly easier to identify and remediate issues.
In future releases additional feedback flows will become available to round out the feedback and guidance available for these types of issues.
Translated Version Alternative Format Improvements
The Translated Version alternative format machine translation has been updated behind the scenes to provide a few key improvements. The content will now be downloaded as HTML format for added ease of use. This release also adds support for the following additional languages within the Translated Version alternative format drop down menu:
- Albanian
- Amharic
- Armenian
- Azerbaijani
- Bengali
- Dari
- French (Canada)
- Georgian
- Gujarati
- Hausa
- Icelandic
- Kannada
- Kazakh
- Macedonian
- Malayalam
- Mongolian
- Pashto
- Sinhala
- Somali
- Spanish (Mexico)
- Tagalog
- Tamil
- Telugu
- Uzbek
Support for the following languages within the Translated Version alternative format is not available:
- Bosnian (Cyrillic)
- Serbian (Cyrillic)
Ally 1.51.1 | Release to production 13 November 2020
Ally 1.51.1 bug fixes and improvements
- Fixed a bug that caused a delay in onboarding new data for Accessibility report updates after the most recent Ally for Public Websites weekly crawls. As part of this, content has been re-onboarded to pull the most recent data into the report.
Ally 1.50.1 | Release to production 13 October 2020
Ally 1.50.1 bug fixes and improvements
- Fixed a bug where in some cases the HTML alternative format would replace valid initials within bibliography lists with automatic alphabetical lettering upon conversion.
Ally 1.49.2 | Release to production 29 September 2020
Ally 1.49.2 bug fixes and improvements
- Implemented improvements to Ally’s alternative formats to support PDFs /ActualText property for referenced marked content.
This is in addition to already supported /ActualText properties of tags.
- Fixed a bug where in some cases French letters with accents were not converted properly in the ePub, Audio file and BeeLine alternative formats.
Ally 1.49.1 | Release to production 25 September 2020
Ally 1.49.1 bug fixes and improvements
- Implemented improvements to the individual domain report CSV exports to show if individual files have issues. Previously, some columns were displaying score results. This update provides further consistency with the other report CSV exports provided by Ally.
Ally 1.49 | Release to production 6 September 2020
Arabic alternative formats
With the Ally 1.42 release, the Ally user interface became available in Arabic, including full right-to-left layout support.
Ally 1.49 introduces support for the Ally alternative formats in Arabic as well. This includes availability in Arabic of the Tagged PDF, semantic HTML, Audio, Electronic Braille and BeeLine Reader alternative formats, as well as right-to-left layout support for the machine learning algorithms that drive the generation of these alternative formats.
Ally 1.49 bug fixes and improvements
- Fixed a bug that occasionally caused the usage reports to be empty.
- Fixed a bug in the conversion of complex tables (e.g., table cell that spans multiple columns) in the different alternative formats.
- Implemented several improvements to the accessibility checklist for HTML files and web pages.
- Implemented several improvements to the checking of larger and more complex Word and PowerPoint documents.
- Fixed a bug that occasionally caused Tagged PDFs containing lots of large images to be flagged as a scanned document.
- Implemented data encryption at rest for AWS S3 storage.
- Implemented several translation improvements to the Brazilian Portuguese translation.
- Implemented several robustness improvements to the Ally for Websites crawler.
Ally 1.48 | Release to production 19 August 2020
Ally 1.48 bug fixes and improvements
- Fixed a bug in the Ally for Websites web page feedback that caused the background color for the embedded web page preview to not always have the correct background color.
- Fixed a bug in the audio alternative format that occasionally caused HTML characters to be read out as part of the audio.
- Fixed a bug in the accessibility checklist that prevented PDFs produced using LaTeX Beamer from being scored.
- Reduced the overall concurrency of the crawler for a single website by spreading crawling across multiple institutions at once.
Ally 1.47 | Release to production 10 August 2020
Ally for Websites web page feedback
The Ally for Websites feedback component is now available for web pages (HTML). In the Ally for Websites accessibility report, the score indicators for web pages can now be selected to launch the feedback component. Within the feedback component, a list of all identifies issues can be found, as well as a preview of the web page with highlights that show exactly where those issues have been identified on the page.
This complements the feedback and guidance that was already available for file content such as PDFs, Word documents and PowerPoint documents. Ally for Websites now provides feedback and highlighting for most content types, which makes it significantly easier to identify and remediate issues.
This feature requires the following to be in place:
- The Ally JavaScript snippet needs to be added to the web page. This also allows for the Ally alternative formats to be made available on the page, although the JavaScript snippet can be added without enabling the alternative formats.
- Institutions that have implemented any measures that prevent their web pages from being iFramed into other websites need to explicitly allow Ally for Websites for the preview and highlighting functionality to work.
Ally 1.47 bug fixes and improvements
- Improved the feedback and guidance for documents containing tables with missing table headings
- Implemented several improvements to the Ally for Websites crawler to further improve the handling of very large websites
Ally 1.46.2 | Release to production 9 July 2020
Ally 1.46.2 bug fixes and improvements
- Improved the detection of failed crawls in Ally for Websites due to too many requests resulting in an error response
Ally 1.46.1 | Release to production 2 July 2020
Ally 1.46.1 bug fixes and improvements
- Implemented several improvements for the rendering of Word and PowerPoint documents as part of the instructor feedback
- Implemented several improvements for the crawling of large and complex websites
Ally 1.46 | Release to production 22 June 2020
Image contains text not in the description
Previously, Ally required that text it detected in an image was part of the image’s alternative description. Because not all text in an image is required in the description and because OCR text detection isn’t 100% accurate, Ally 1.46 removes this check from the accessibility score. In a future release, the extracted text will become a description suggestion.
The removal of this accessibility check applies to all new and updated images, and will retroactively be applied to existing images over the next few weeks.
Ally 1.46 bug fixes and improvements
- Fixed a bug that would occasionally cause the incorrect image to be highlighted when showing a document containing images without a description in the instructor feedback.
- Implemented several stability improvements in the Ally for Websites crawler.
Ally 1.44.2 | Release to production 4 June 2020
Ally 1.44.2 bug fixes and improvements
- Fixed a bug that caused the Library Reference fields to be empty when attempting to edit an existing Library Reference
- Prevent Ally from processing .dwg (from drawing) files
Ally 1.44.1 | Release to production 1 June 2020
ePub alternative format
The ePub alternative format is now available in Ally for Websites as an additional alternative format for web pages. This makes it possible to download website content and access it (offline) on a mobile device, as well as use it for reading and annotation purposes.
Audio alternative format
The audio alternative format is now available in Arabic and Icelandic. The voice for the Turkish audio alternative format has also been replaced with a higher quality alternative.
Ally 1.44.1 bug fixes and improvements
- The YouTube caption check has been improved to reflect the full set of permutations provided by the YouTube API
Ally 1.44 | Release to production 15 May 2020
Ally 1.44 bug fixes and improvements
- Fixed a bug that caused the incorrect tab to be selected when returning to the Domains tab in the accessibility report.
- Fixed a bug in the instructor feedback that caused an error when selecting the I need to keep it button for a seizure inducing animation.
Ally 1.43 | Release to production 6 May 2020
Ally 1.43 bug fixes and improvements
- Fixed a bug that caused the alternative formats modal to not close once the generated alternative format was downloaded
Ally 1.42.1 | Release to production 1 May 2020
Ally 1.42.1 bug fixes and improvements
- Added the institution name to the file name for the institutional report CSV export and the usage report export
- Added a more meaningful error message when an audio alternative format can’t be generated because the original document is longer than 100,000 characters
- The usage report export is now supported on older versions of Excel as well
- Fixed a bug in the Accessibility Score overview graph in the institutional report that caused time periods without any associated data to show as a 0% score
Ally 1.42 | Release to production 23 April 2020
Ally in Arabic
As part of our efforts to support universal design and equitable access around the world, Ally 1.42 makes the Ally User Interface available in Arabic. There is now Arabic 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.
Note that the Ally alternative formats are not yet available in Arabic. This is the team’s next priority, and will be made available in a future release.
Ally 1.42 bug fixes and improvements
- Fixed a bug in the instructor feedback that caused the Help link to overlap with the instructor feedback guidance
Ally 1.41.1 | Release to production 17 April 2020
Ally 1.41.1 bug fixes and improvements
- Fixed a bug in the institutional report that caused the comparison between the current time period and the previous time period to be incorrect.
- Fixed a validation bug in the date picker for the Usage Reports.
Ally 1.41 | Release to production 6 April 2020
New Features, Updated features
PDFs without title
A full new feedback flow for instructors and editors has been added for PDFs that don’t have a title. This flow contains documentation on what this means, why this is important, and detailed step-by-step guidance on how to add a PDF title.
Generate tagged PDFs
The feedback guidance for instructors and editors on how to generate a tagged PDF from a Microsoft Office Word and PowerPoint document has been updated to reflect the latest changes in Microsoft Office 365. Several screenshots to help visualize the different steps have been added as well.
BeeLine Reader night mode
The BeeLine Reader alternative format has been extended to offer an additional “Night Mode” view with a corresponding color gradient. This night mode can help reduce eye strain in low light conditions, can reduce screen glare while outside and can help save energy for mobile devices.
Ally 1.41 bug fixes and improvements
- Fixed a bug that would cause the instructor feedback Print View to occasionally be empty.
- Improved the speed at which alternative formats are generated.
Ally 1.40 | Release to production 27 March 2020
BeeLine Reader alternative format
The BeeLine Reader alternative format is aimed at making on-screen reading faster and easier. To achieve this, it uses an eye-guiding color gradient to help pull the reader’s eyes from one line to the next, and reported benefits include increased reading speed and enhanced focus. The tool can benefit students with dyslexia, ADHD and low vision, as well as providing a better on-screen reading experience for all students.
Several institutions have been piloting this new alternative format over the last few months, and based on the extremely positive feedback we’re now making this alternative format available for all. The BeeLine Reader alternative format is available as part of your Ally license at no additional cost, and is now enabled by default.
The BeeLine Reader alternative format is also available in the Ally Feature Flag configuration, allowing for the format to easily be enabled / disabled if necessary.
More information on BeeLine Reader
Thanks so much to the institutions that have participated in the pilot!
COVID-19
Due to COVID-19, we have been seeing a significant increase in Ally usage and a large number of institutions adopting Ally as part of their move to fully online. The team’s primary consideration remains making sure that we provide a seamless service, and a lot of work is being done behind the scenes to ensure that all components are scaled up / out as required and to create additional onboarding capacity.
Usage reports
The Usage Reports for the Ally for Websites integration have also been updated to use Website-specific vocabulary such as “Domain”.
Ally 1.40 bug fixes and improvements
- Implemented support for PPSX (PowerPoint Slideshow) files.
- Fixed a bug in the Ally for Websites integration that prevented the default “Help” link from opening the Blackboard Help website.
- Improved the accessibility of the tabs in the institutional report to allow them to be selected using the arrow keys.
Ally 1.39.3 | Release to production 4 March 2020
COVID-19
The team has been taking several pre-emptive infrastructure measures to help prepare for significantly increased traffic as a growing number of schools move to fully online courses. We will continue to monitor closely and take any additional steps required to ensure a seamless service.
Ally 1.39.3 bug fixes and improvements
- Fixed a bug that prevented the BeeLine Reader alternative format from rendering correctly on some mobile devices.
- Improved the “Is this PDF tagged” accessibility check by excluding PDFs that only contain empty tags.
- Ally for Websites now automatically tries to re-generate alternative formats that failed to generate previously.
- Fixed a bug that caused an unexpected animation when hovering over the accessibility score in the instructor feedback.
- Fixed an accessibility score rounding error in the institutional accessibility report.
Ally 1.39.2 | Release to production 4 March 2020
Ally 1.39.2 bug fixes and improvements
- Fixed a bug that would occasionally cause the Accessibility score chart in the institutional accessibility report to not load correctly due to a race condition in loading the Ally UI assets.
Ally 1.39.1 | Release to production 2 March 2020
Electronic Braille Configuration
The Braille code used for a particular language can now be configured at the institutional level. For example, this means that the Braille code used for English can be mapped to either Unified English Braille contracted (grade 2) or uncontracted (grade 1).
Electronic Braille configuration changes can be requested through a Behind The Blackboard support ticket.
Ally 1.39.1 bug fixes and improvements
- The Translated Version alternative format for the Ally for WCM and Ally for Websites integrations now opens immediately in the browser instead of being downloaded.
- Fixed a bug that would occasionally cause the Tagged PDF alternative format to be downloaded using the wrong mime type.
- Fixed a bug that caused the Ally for Websites alternative formats to be blank for web pages that require the “Accept-Encoding” header.
Ally 1.38.2 | Release to production 7 February 2020
Ally 1.38.2 bug fixes and improvements
The following bug fix is for both Ally for websites and Ally for WCM.
- Fixed a bug that would occasionally cause the x-axis labels in the Accessibility Score graph in the institutional report to overlap.
Ally 1.38.1 | Release to production 1 February 2020
Ally 1.38.1 bug fixes and improvements
- Bug fix and improvement for Ally for websites only:
- Improved the Ally for Websites crawler to never trigger Google Analytics on the crawled web pages.
- Bug fixes and improvements for Ally for websites and WCM:
- Updated the institutional report to show accessibility scores to the 1st decimal place.
- Fixed a bug that occasionally caused the institutional report CSV export to contain future dates.
- Fixed a bug that would occasionally prevent the correct language from being detected in Norwegian documents. This would also cause the audio to be read in English instead of Norwegian.
- Fixed a bug that prevented image descriptions consisting of a URL followed by text from being considered a valid image description.
- Improved the display of the Library Reference in the alternative formats modal.
Ally 1.38 | Release to production 17 January 2020
New features, Updated features
Accessibility Scoring
The Ally institutional report used to provide a Without Ally score and a With Ally score. The Without Ally score was the baseline average accessibility score based on the content in the LMS or on the website, while the With Ally added an estimated level of automated improvement based on the alternative formats.
The Without Ally and With Ally scores have now been replaced by the following scores:
- Overall average accessibility score
- Average file accessibility score
- Average WYSIWYG accessibility score (for Ally for LMS integrations)
- Average Web Page accessibility score (for Ally for WCM and Ally for Websites)
The Average file accessibility score is the score for uploaded file content such as PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoint documents, Images, and so on. The Average WYSIWYG accessibility score is the score for (HTML) content created through the LMS content editor. Average Web Page accessibility score is the score for the website’s pages. The Overall average accessibility score is the combined accessibility score for both files and WYSIWYG / Web Page content.
Typically, HTML content is much more accessible in nature. This is especially true for WYSIWYG content in the LMS, as they are usually small and simple HTML fragments. Splitting out the scores in this way allows for a better distinction between content that tends to be more accessible in nature and content that tends to be less accessible in nature, allowing for a better understanding of the overall accessibility score and allowing for more informed training and remediation strategies to be identified.
Ally for LMS
Ally for Websites
Ally 1.38 bug fixes and improvements
- Fixed a known issue that prevented the Ally LTI tools (institutional report, configuration UI, course accessibility report) from loading correctly in Chrome 80+. More information about this known issue is available on the Ally user group site.
- Fixed an issue that would prevent the usage reports from generating for institutions with large amounts of usage data.
- Fixed a bug in the display of the Add description button in the instructor feedback for images without a description for the Welsh translation.
- Fixed a bug that prevented the Download icon in the instructor feedback from displaying correctly in the Swedish translation.
- Implemented several screen reader accessibility improvements in the institutional report.
Ally 1.37.1 | Release to production 7 January 2020
Updated features
Ally for Websites Alternative Formats
Ally for Websites now makes it possible to exclude links to PDFs, Word, Powerpoint and other documents from showing in the list of available alternative formats for that page. This can be achieved by adding the `data-ally-af-disabled` attribute to the link that should be excluded from the alternative formats.
Ally 1.37.1 bug fixes and improvements
- Added the content id to the Data tab in the usage reports.
- Fixed a bug in the Ally Configuration UI that prevented the Terms menu from filtering the list correctly.
