Ally 2.15 | Release to production: July 17, 2025

Upgraded AI Alt Text Assistant

Based on valuable feedback from the Ally community, we’ve given Ally’s AI Alt Text Assistant a major upgrade!

Now powered by AWS Bedrock, the assistant is even more intelligent and is able to tackle complex images like STEM diagrams, graphs, and even handwritten notes. That means more accurate, helpful alt text suggestions right from the start.

For Instructors:  

Instructors can take advantage of this new power without changing the existing workflow.  With just a single click, instructors can still generate suggested alternative descriptions for images embedded in WYSIWYG content or as standalone items.  For images embedded in WYSIWYG content, the AI Alt Text Assistant now also considers the context of the surrounding content as part of the initial prompt to power even more detailed descriptions.

Image 1: Image description suggestion when fixing an image of handwritten content in the Ally Instructor Feedback

Ally Instructor Feedback giving suggestion for the image description for a handwritten note

The AI Alt Text Assistant still makes sure that the instructor remains in complete control, including the ability to edit or remove the AI-generated suggestions to best fit your intended context and audience. (As a reminder, alternative descriptions are not applied automatically—each suggestion requires the instructor’s review and approval.)

For Administrators:  

This upgrade does not require any new action from the Administrator.  If you already have turned on the AI Alt Text Assistant, no action is needed, and you will get the advantages of this upgrade going forward.  If you have not yet turned on this feature, Ally administrators can configure it from the Ally Configuration settings.  To use the Alt Text Assistant, you must opt-in and turn it on from your admin console.  (This feature is still off by default.)

Usage of this feature is still tracked via the Ally Usage Report (exported from your Ally Institutional Report dashboard).  

This feature follows our Anthology Trustworthy AI principles, and we’ve updated our supporting documentation to reference this new model, including:

  • Humans in control
  • Fairness
  • Privacy
  • Security
  • Safety

We recommend reviewing the documents linked below as you consider using Ally’s AI Alt Text Assistant: 

This feature update is available in Blackboard, Canvas, D2L Brightspace and Moodle LMS integrations.

Filtering the CSV Export by Date

Ally administrators now have the added ability to filter the CSV export by a specified date range directly from within the Institutional Report. This allows administrators to narrow down the amount of data to facilitate easier data manipulation or additional analysis outside of the Ally Institutional report without having to deal with the entirety of the dataset.

Download CSV File pop-up where users can select the date for the export

Months, Terms and Year reports will be filtered by date. The courses.csv will be filtered by the ‘Observed Deleted on’ date and will not include courses that were marked as deleted outside of your chosen date range. 

Individual course reports (exported for a specific course) cannot currently be filtered by date and will not show the option for selecting a date range.