Versionsinformation för Ally för LMS

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.

Ally 2.13.1 | Release to production: March 27, 2025

Math Support for Microsoft Word Documents Now Available for Immersive Reader Alternative Format

As an immediate follow-up to our last release to add support for Office Math formulas within Word documents, Ally's math conversion has been upgraded to now also include support for math within Microsoft Immersive Reader Alternative Format. Students can now take advantage of the benefits of Immersive Reader to better engage and interact with this type of content.

As part of this release, we have also updated the MathJax rendering within Ally's Alternative Format processing to enable the MathJax contextual menu option. The contextual menu provides additional useful accessibility features that can be very beneficial to all students.

Bug Fixes and Improvements

• Fixed an issue for Moodle 4.3 and 4.4 where in some cases students were presented with an error when downloading alternative formats for a Moodle page.

Ally 2.13 | Release to production: March 19, 2025

Math Support for Microsoft Word Documents Now Available for HTML Alternative Formats

As part of our ongoing efforts to support students through the power of flexibility and choice, Ally's document conversion process has been upgraded to include the first version of support for Office Math found in Microsoft Word documents. Students downloading the HTML and BeeLine Reader Alternative Formats will now see the math equations rendered as MathML via MathJax in their browser. This is an important first step to support math content in a wider range of Ally Alternative Formats and means that students will no longer be missing important math equations when downloading their preferred HTML option.

Image 1: HTML Alternative Format with rendered Math.

This conversion happens automatically as part of Ally's processing pipeline and does not require any configuration from the administrator. To be considered for conversion, the math content must be inserted as an equation in Word. Otherwise, Ally will not recognize this as math.

This is the first of multiple releases to support math within Ally's Alternative Format options. Support for additional formats, including Audio and Immersive Reader, will be handled in subsequent releases in order to continue to provide immediate benefits to the students. Support for math in PowerPoint will also be included in a future release.

Bug Fixes and Improvements

• Fixed an issue in Moodle where in some cases instructors were not able to navigate to the next image missing a description when using the AI Alt Text Assistant within Ally's Instructor Feedback.
• Fixed an issue within the Moodle filter plugin for Moodle 4.4 that was causing Ally indicators to not show when the course URL contained section.php for course section pages. Please note you will need to ensure you have installed the latest version of the plugin, which is 4.4.5 - 2025031900.

Ally 2.12.4 | Release to production: March 5, 2025

Alternative Formats Now Available in D2L Brightspace New Learner Experience View

Ally Alternative Format icons are now supported within the D2L Brightspace New Learner Experience for students. Students will see a new Ally Alternative formats icon when they open the file view from the content module if the New Learner Experience is enabled. This additional support helps to expand student options and allows them to take advantage of the flexibility and choice offered by Ally's Alternative Formats.

Image 1: File view with Alternative Formats available.

This support is specific to the New Learner Experience and does not impact other New Content Experiences within Brightspace. Future support of other new experiences will continue to be considered separately as part of the product roadmaps.

Bug Fixes and Improvements

• Fixed an issue where in some cases the Ally tooltips in the Institutional Report remained visible underneath the report results at the bottom of the screen.

Ally 2.12.3 | Release to production: February 27, 2025

Bug Fixes and Improvements

• Fixed an issue in Moodle where instructors were sometimes presented with a "Perfect" message without being able to fix the image description despite it being flagged as an issue in the Instructor Feedback panel.
• Fixed an issue in Blackboard where the Ally score indicator was removed when instructors updated the title while in edit mode within the Blackboard Content Designer.
• Implemented D2L Integration backend improvements to upgrade API versions for Learning Platform(lp) and Learning Environment(le) components.

Ally 2.12.2 | Release to production: February 13, 2025

Bug Fixes and Improvements

• Fixed an issue in the Institutional Report that sometimes caused the Term dropdown to not be selectable by the user.
• Fixed a display issue where the error message for unsupported files was extending beyond the boundaries of the Instructor Feedback panel.
• Fixed an issue in Moodle where images in a page were not displayed in the Instructor Feedback Preview when accessed via the Course Accessibility Report.

Ally 2.12 | Release to production: January 30, 2025

Alternative Formats for Video Studio Videos within Blackboard

Learners now have the ability to download Alternative Formats for Video Studio videos within Blackboard Documents when using the Ally Alternative Formats feature. When enabled by the Administrator, students see the Video as a valid file type to download a variety of Alternative Formats based on the transcript of the video when navigating through the Alternative Formats menu for Blackboard Documents.

Image 1: Alternative Formats available for Video

Administrators

Administrators configure this through the Ally Admin Configuration console to enable the ability to download alternative formats for Video Studio videos.

Image 2: Ally Configuration screen with feature defaulted as "off"

Note: The feature is automatically configured as "off" by default in the Ally Admin console.

Bug Fixes and Improvements

• Fixed an accessibility issue where "Close" was not properly underlined on hover within the Instructor Feedback.
• Fixed an issue within Ally Configuration where the Disable and Enable and All Terms button arrows were not visible when button was selected.
• Fixed an issue in Blackboard where the Instructor Feedback flows for WYSIWYG content did not consistently mention table headings missing content as the next item to address after the instructor has fixed another issue.
• Fixed an issue in Blackboard where the Instructor Feedback Preview window would sometimes timeout and require reloading the browser tab.
• Fixed a browser state issue in Blackboard where Instructors would sometimes see multiple Ally score indicators on one WYSIWYG item if they had opened multiple courses the same browser session.
• Fixed an issue where the Course Accessibility Report score appeared out of sync from the live Instructor Feedback for fixes applied to WYSIWYG content with empty headings.
• Moodle 4.4 plugins have been updated and made available.

Ally 2.11.1 | Release to production: January 13, 2025

Bug Fixes and Improvements

• Fixed an issue within D2L Brightspace where instructors could not see the Ally Score Indicators when editing supported WYSIWYG conflict due to a conflict with TinyMCE versions. Note that this does not apply to New Content Experience.
• Fixed an issue where the fields used to calculate totals for "Used AI for Alt Text Suggestion" and "Used AI but Alt Text was altered" in Ally Usage Report were not being set with a valid value for images embedded within Rich Content.
• Fixed an issue within the Ally Admin configuration tool where the button for "Disable/enable all existing courses" was clickable outside of the element.
• Fixed an issue that prevented Ally from displaying the correct heading options in the dropdown when applying a Quick Fix for the "Heading do not follow a logical order" issue within the Instructor Feedback guidance panel.