Ally 1.46 | Release to production 22 June 2020

EesySoft integration, Moodle integration, Updated features

EesySoft integration

We’re excited to expand our integration with EesySoft, a popular tool that integrates into the Learning Management System. EesySoft can be used to create campaigns to communicate with users, guide them through tasks in the LMS, and view the impact on behavior and tool adoption.
 
EesySoft already captured clicks on the alternative format icons and the accessibility indicators, and included this in the Eesysoft reports and campaigns. Now, institutions with an EesySoft license can allow more  detailed monitoring of interactions in the alternative formats modal, the instructor feedback, and the course accessibility report. Institutions can use this data for adoption reports and campaigns within EesySoft.
 
The EesySoft integration is disabled by default, and can be enabled in the Ally Configuration UI. Note that this integration requires an EesySoft license.

Moodle institutional hierarchy

We expanded the Moodle integration to include the institutional hierarchy information for a course. You’ll find additional information in the institutional report under the Department id and Department name columns in the courses.csv CSV export. This institutional hierarchy information is based on the “categories” that have been configured within Moodle.
 
Now, administrators can calculate an Ally score for each department in the institutional hierarchy with a tool like Excel. This is the first step to support native reporting by institutional hierarchy in the institutional report in the future.
 
Note that this feature requires the additional `moodle/category:viewhiddencategories` permission for the Ally API user. This permission is granted automatically in the latest version of the Ally Moodle plugins.

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.