Ally 1.13 | Release to production 12 February, 2018

New Features, Updated Features, Learning Management System Integrations

In this Ally 1.13 release, we focused our development and design on academic effectiveness. You’ll see below that we’ve also aligned our feature list in to groups based on value and benefit to you and your users.

Universal design for learning

Improved alternative formats

The conversion algorithms for the alternative formats have been updated and should bring a significant improvement in accuracy for documents with a higher accessibility score. This is achieved by incorporating more of the semantic information that’s present within the original document.

Improved instructor feedback for images

Several improvements have been introduced in the instructor feedback flow for images without an alternative description. This includes improved guidance and error messages for images with an invalid alternative description, an easier editing workflow for images that already have an alternative description, and so on.

Library reference information available to students

Students are now able to see library reference information in the alternative format modal. This library reference information can be provided by the instructor in the instructor feedback flow for scanned documents and untagged PDFs.

New language support

Ally is now available in these languages.

  • Polish
  • Norwegian
  • Catalan

Availability in these languages includes the Ally interface, as well as the alternative formats (including the audio format).

Heading check for WYSIWYG content

An additional accessibility check has been added for WYSIWYG content. This accessibility check verifies that the heading levels in the WYSIWYG content correctly follow the heading levels that are present in the Learning Management System (LMS) itself.

This check should now be part of the reported accessibility issues in the institutional report.

Decorative images

The Ally integration for Canvas has been updated to align with the new “Decorative image” functionality that was recently introduced in Canvas. This ensures that Ally is able to recognize images that have been marked as decorative in Canvas, as well as Canvas recognizing images that have been marked as decorative through Ally.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug in the Blackboard Learn Original integration where the accessibility indicators for Content Items with multiple attachments wouldn’t display properly.
  • Fixed a bug in the Web Community Manager integration where courses with a space in the URL would not be checked for accessibility issues.
  • The CSV export in the institutional report will now correctly mark the HTML accessibility checks that succeeded as a “1”.
  • Prevent the “This image does not have an alternative description” issue from being listed in the institutional report for images that have been marked as decorative.