Ally 2.8.1 | Release to production: February 15, 2024
Quick fixes, guidance, and content previews now available for D2L Brightspace “HTML” content
Ally for D2L Brightspace
Ally 2.8.1 brings a key enhancement to the Instructor Feedback within the Ally Brightspace integration that treats “HTML” content as WYSIWYG content and gives instructors the ability to leverage Ally's capabilities including quick fixes, What and Why guidance and content previews.
Instead of frequently encountering “Guidance Not Available Yet” in the feedback, instructors will now be able to address issues more quickly and easily within the Ally Instructor Feedback flow and focus on the most impactful changes to content.
Image 1: Instructor Feedback with available quick fix for insufficient contrast
This improvement includes Quick Fix capabilities for the following accessibility issues:
- Text with insufficient contrast
- Tables that are missing headers
- Tables without headers
- Images with redundant text
- Images without descriptions
- Heading order
Issues without quick fixes available will still be shown under “All Issues” and may not have specific guidance available pending future roadmap development.
After this release, any new HTML file created by an instructor will be treated as WYSIWYG going forward. Older existing HTML content within Brightspace will be rescored and reprocessed by Ally in waves over the next few weeks to migrate this data and provide a consistent instructor experience.
For Administrators - Feature activation and file rescoring
Feature activation and file rescoring will be triggered by region with this release beginning with our Canada region (prod-ca-central-1.ally.ac) on 2/15/24. Other regions will follow in the order shown below:
- Wave 1: Canada (prod-ca-central-1.ally.ac)
- Wave 2: Asia-Pacific (prod-ap-southeast-2.ally.ac)
- Wave 3: Europe (prod-eu-central-1.ally.ac)
- Wave 4: US (prod.ally.ac)
In addition to the instructor improvements noted above, Administrators will see the following differences in the Ally reports:
- All HTML files and existing WYSIWYG content will be referred to as “HTML Fragment” in the Institutional Report. This change will also be reflected in CSV exports and the Ally API for reporting tools.
- The score for each file may change depending on the accessibility issues flagged by Ally after content is reprocessed. This is because of the different checks Ally applies for WYSIWYG content vs HTML content.
Image 2: Ally Institutional Report Total content created chart for administrators
File rescoring will only affect HTML files. Other file types like Word, PowerPoint, PDF, images, or LibreOffice are not affected and their score will remain the same.
Other Improvements:
With this update, “language not set” and “missing title” will no longer be flagged as issues in the HTML content in Brightspace to help minimize frustration for instructors that cannot edit these attributes in the content interface.