Ally 1.32 | Release to production 27 June 2019

New Features, Updated Features

Institutional hierarchy

Ally 1.32 introduces the ability for Blackboard Ally to record the configured institutional hierarchy within the LMS. The institutional hierarchy information for each course is then included under the `Department id` and `Department name` columns in the `courses.csv` CSV export in the institutional report. This makes it straightforward to calculate the Ally score for each element in the institutional hierarchy (e.g., departments) in Excel, and serves as the foundational work to support native reporting by institutional hierarchy in the institutional report as part of our roadmap.

Note that this feature is currently only available for the Canvas integration. The Blackboard Learn, Moodle and Open LMS integrations require additional REST APIs and support for those integrations will be made available as those REST APIs are released.

Course copies and imports

In the last few weeks, there were several cases where we incurred delays in the processing of new course copies and imports. As part of this release, several infrastructure improvements have been rolled out that should remove these delays.

Note that a small delay between copying / importing a course and Ally processing the content inside of the course is still expected.

Ally 1.32 bug fixes and improvements

  • Fixed a bug in the Learn Ultra integration that occasionally prevented an image description set through the content editor from being recognized correctly.
  • The scanned document accessibility check has been improved for long documents.
  • Implemented several accessibility improvements in the Blackboard Ally for Websites alternative formats modal.
  • Improved the handling of Word and PowerPoint documents that are flagged as zip bombs.