Post - Release Notes - Ally User Group

# Ally 1.24 (January 28, 2019) ## Previews and highlights The instructor feedback will now show in-browser previews for PDFS, Word documents and PowerPoint documents. These previews are then used to identify where in the document specific accessibility issues can be found. Highlights are currently provided for: • Images without an appropriate alternative description • Text fragments with insufficient contrast • Tables without table headings The instructor feedback for other accessibility issues will just show the content preview without highlights. This should make it significantly easier to identify issues in a document, and should help cut down remediation time dramatically. This feature is immediately available for all LMS integrations and the Ally for Web Community Manager integration, and should not require any updates. ## Bug fixes and improvements • Fixed a bug in the Ally for Websites integration that caused the CSV export for an individual (sub)domain to fail. • Hidden heading tags are now excluded from HTML accessibility checks. • Fixed a bug that caused headings to not be identified correctly in certain Word documents exported from Google Docs. • Fixed a bug that caused the language to be misidentified for Word documents that only contain tables. • Fixed a bug that caused a small number of “.docx” documents to be identified as “Malformed”. • Fixed an encoding issue that prevented certain HTML files exported from Word from being processed correctly.

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Christopher Philips · Jan 28, 2019

Wow, this is a big release - and sounds like an important piece to get in place for the eventual instructor dashboard functionality, thumbs up!

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Chris Burford · Jan 28, 2019

With regard to these types of releases for Ally, if we have Ally integrated with our Blackboard (Bb) LMS system, we will automatically see these latest fixes in Bb when Ally pushes the release out? In other words, we don’t need to open up a ticket with Behind the Bb/Bb Support to schedule an upgrade with the cloud integration between Ally and our Bb LMS (if we are self or manage-hosted, for example)? Since Ally is cloud-based, I’m guessing that when Ally rolls out a new release, we’ll automatically see these fixes in our Bb LMS…we don’t need to schedule anything with Bb Support to receive the latest release of Ally with these fixes in our integration?

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Nicolaas Matthijs · Jan 28, 2019

[Chris Burford](mention:66498086-7f4e-450c-9a6b-75256659308e "/u/chris_bert/") : That’s correct. These improvements are made available automatically, and should now be visible in your environment. In case a feature requires opting in or an upgrade to the LMS itself, this will be mentioned explicitly in the release notes.

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Chris Burford · Jan 28, 2019

@Nicolaas Matthijs : Thank you so much for the quick response Nicolaas. We’re working on our plan for how we will manage those updates that we’ll see in the separate Bb Ally product that’s integrated with our Bb Learn 9 environment. For our Bb LMS, our updates (Q2, Q4, and cumulative updates or “CUs”) are usually planned months in advance, so we just wanted to make sure there wasn’t an option available to us as a Bb Ally customer where we could hold off on a particular Bb Ally release or update should we need more time to prepare our instructors or training staff for the changes that they may be seeing with the new Bb Ally release? For example, I didn’t know if we might have the option to reach out to Bb Support and open a case/ticket and ask them to hold off on a specific BB Ally release and keep us on an older release to give us additional time to update our documentation and training for instructors and support staff? It sounds like when Bb Ally rolls out a new release, we’ll see this in our Bb Learn environment fairly quickly…and this is a good thing! We like the idea that updates, fixes, and patches can be made available quickly. For our other departments like our training department, we just wanted to make sure we were correctly explaining how the process would work with Bb Ally and that they would pretty much see the new release in Bb Learn when Ally released the updates/upgrades. Does that sound correct? On the Ally website, there is the “Release Notes” channel (for lack of a better word). Just out of curiosity, do you happen to know how much advanced notice we might see there for new releases of the Bb Ally product (if an advanced notice is applicable)? Again, this is just to plan and prepare our staff/instructors and provide them with advance notice of when they might see the next set of changes in Bb Ally. Thank you.

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Nicolaas Matthijs · Jan 30, 2019

> For our other departments like our training department, we just wanted to make sure we were correctly explaining how the process would work with Bb Ally and that they would pretty much see the new release in Bb Learn when Ally released the updates/upgrades. That’s correct. There is no way to hold off on a particular release of Ally. All integrations are automatically upgraded as soon as a new release goes out. However, we are increasingly starting to move to “feature flags” for significant user-facing changes. This allows the institution themselves to decide at what point they want to enable this user-facing change (although the option may switch to enabled for all at some point in time). Examples of where we’ve done this are the “Translated Version” alternative format, the ability to launch the instructor feedback from the institutional report, etc. and I expect to see more of these going forward. We are also planning to make a “feature flags” tab available as part of the Ally Configuration UI, which will make it easy for an institution to see what feature flags are available and can then control them themselves. We don’t have any plans to introduce this process for small improvements or bug fixes though, as it should be very beneficial for everyone to have access to these as soon as possible.

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Kristina McElroy · Feb 5, 2019

[Nicolaas Matthijs](mention:feaeaa5c-e5d0-4308-89ab-87c59ba030f1 "/u/nicolaas/") Would you mind if we uploaded the .mov file to our media server and shared it as part of a blog post highlighting the in-document preview for our faculty?

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Nicolaas Matthijs · Feb 5, 2019

[Kristina McElroy](mention:36415af4-f8de-45e8-a7a3-b9095f3eb1bc "/u/kmcelro3/") : Definitely! Feel free to repurpose the recording as you see fit :smiley: