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.