Ally 2.14 | Release to production: April 15, 2025
This past Saturday, April 12th, marked 8 years since the launch of Ally and the Ally Community (dating all the way back to Release Note 1.0). As a celebration of the impact that you all continue to make every day, the Ally team decided to bring some surprises to mark the occasion in a special release!
Handwritten Content Now Supported as Part of Ally’s Scanned PDF Conversion
In the spirit of celebrating, support for Handwritten Content within scanned PDFs is also now available as an early release! Students downloading the Ally Alternative Formats will now benefit from better conversion of this often-problematic content as part of normal Ally processing through our Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine.
Note: This applies to handwritten content found within scanned PDFs.
Image 1: Example of Handwritten Content
Alternative Text for Standalone Images Travels with the Canvas Export/Import Process
Alternative text added to images in the Canvas Files area through Ally's Instructor Feedback will now follow the images during the Canvas export and import process for new courses. This update helps to ensure Instructor efforts towards adding alternative text are not lost when exporting and importing a new course.
Upon importing a Canvas Course Export Package, Ally will identify the source CourseID and align the alternative text saved in the Ally database with the new course without requiring any additional steps from the instructor. After a few minutes (so that Canvas and Ally can process the import), instructors will see the red indicator change to green in the Files area and should see their previously entered alternative text applied. (It is important to remember that this wait time may be longer or shorter depending on Canvas processing time.)
This solution only applies to Canvas Course Export Packages (zip) and does not apply to the other Content Types in the list.
Image 2: Canvas Import Content Interface
While this currently applies only to Canvas integrations, a similar solution is planned for a follow-up release to support alternative text carryover for standalone images within Blackboard courses. D2L Brightspace and Moodle impacts are to be determined based on additional analysis.
Math Support for Microsoft Word Documents Now Available for Audio Alternative Format
Continuing our efforts to support math content in a wider range of Alternative Formats for students, our conversion process for Math within Microsoft Word Documents now includes support for the Audio Alternative Format. Students downloading the Audio format will now be able to get the math content in an understandable way as they enjoy the benefits of being able to listen to their content.
Bug Fixes and Improvements
- Fixed an accessibility issue in Blackboard where in some cases the Ally score indicator was blocking keyboard navigation while working in the Content Designer.
- Fixed an issue in Moodle (v4.3) where in some cases the suggested alternative text for the first image was incorrectly carried over to the second image before saving.