Releaseopmerkingen 2026
Ally 2.18.3 Release to production: April 20, 2026
Document Processing Improvements
As part of our ongoing commitment to continuously improve quality and fidelity of content within Ally’s Instructor Feedback and Alternative Format processing, the 2.18.3 release brings critical improvements and enhancements to the underlying document conversion process that powers these key user features.
Ally’s document processing logic has been upgraded to provide smarter, faster, and higher quality conversion when dealing with files uploaded into the course. This brings several improvements to instructors and students, including:
Decreased cases of false positive contrast issues that appear in the Instructor Feedback File Previews
Improved handling of shapes within PowerPoint presentations, including conversion of things like arrows within the document
Improved recognition of alternative text applied to shapes after converting to PDF
Improved announcement of decorative images within alternative formats, including the audio alternative format
Improved recognition of images and application of Figure tags when converting to PDF
In addition to these user facing improvements, this update also includes optimization of Ally’s underlying infrastructure to help improve general performance and speed of processing content as it is received from the LMS.
Opmerking
Our teams will continue to analyze and identify additional possible improvements or edge cases that may need to be addressed in the future.
Upgraded AI Alt Text Assistant
The AI Alt Text Assistant has been updated to take advantage of several additional improvements in the underlying AWS Bedrock AI models, including decreasing the number of timeouts when requesting suggested alternative text and improved handling to avoid hallucinations when analyzing specific images.
As a reminder, the updated AI Alt Text Assistant Transparency Note can be viewed here with additional details about this feature: https://help.anthology.com/ally-lms/en/administrators/ai-alt-text-assistant.html
Bug Fixes and Improvements
Fixed a bug in the Instructor Feedback that caused incorrect highlighting to be applied in the preview when the PDF still doesn’t have the correct language set after attempting to apply the fix.
Fixed a bug in the Instructor Feedback where clicking Try Again when a PDF still doesn’t have the correct language set did not take the instructor back to the language selection panel.
Fixed a bug in Canvas that prevented the instructor from opening the Instructor Feedback on an OCRed PDF that also had a fixed title.
Fixed an accessibility issue in the Instructor Feedback panel that incorrectly shifted focus between elements when using the Back button.
Fixed an accessibility issue in the Alternative Formats modal window that caused the Original File format to not be downloaded when navigating and selecting with a keyboard.
Ally 2.18.2 Release to production: April 9, 2026
Bug Fixes and Improvements
Fixed an issue in Blackboard where Ally indicators did not show for file attachments within Assignment instructions.
Fixed a bug where in some cases while navigating the Instructor Feedback panel for WYSIWYG content, clicking the Bold or Italic icons in the rich content editor would activate the Auto-generate button for the AI Alt Text Assistant.
Fixed a bug where in some cases replacing an image with contrast issues with a brand-new image via the Instructor Feedback file upload did not update the document preview.
Fixed a bug in Canvas that prevented the Ally indicators from showing correctly on a Canvas Syllabus when Show recent announcements on Course home page was enabled.
Ally 2.18.1 Release to production: April 2, 2026
Bug Fixes and Improvements
Updated Moodle plugins for Moodle 4.5 and Moodle 5 to include bugfix backports to address minor bugs.
Fixed an issue with the AI Alt Text Assistant where in some cases instructors were presented with an error message when attempting to suggest alternative text due to the primary model being unavailable.
Ally 2.18 Release to production: March 26, 2026
New Library Reference Admin Feature Flag Now Available
As part of our continued effort to provide more granular levels of control for administrators looking to manage the PDF remediation experience for Instructors, a new feature flag is available in the Ally Configuration options that allows the Library Reference workflow to be turned off.
Administrators can now turn off the Library Reference feature to remove the instructor's ability to add Library References to PDFs when the original file is unavailable while working through various PDF-specific issues. This additional layer of control will help align this feature with institutional preferences and processes and provides additional flexibility when determining how best to manage fixing PDFs at scale.
Image 1: New Feature Flag within the Ally Configuration Options
Administrators can find this new feature flag within the Features tab in the Ally Configuration tool listed under Library reference.
Opmerking
Library References will remain turned on by default with this release. Turning off Library References with this new feature flag will not remove previously added Library References from content and will only prevent new ones being added going forward.
Bug Fixes and Improvements
Fixed a bug in Canvas that caused the Ally indicators column to disappear from the New Files area when the screen was resized.
Fixed an accessibility issue in Canvas integrations that prevented correct focus from being applied when using a keyboard to navigate Ally accessibility score indicators within Canvas Pages.
Fixed a broken web link in the Ally Configuration settings for the AI Alt Text Assistant Terms of Use.
Migrated our SMTP Email services for the backend infrastructure that handles custom help email flows.
Ally 2.17.5 Release to production: March 12, 2026
Blackboard UNSAFE_HTML Files No Longer Included in Reports
As part of our ongoing commitment to instructor efficiency and clarity in reporting, the Ally reports will no longer consider UNSAFE_HTML files as part of the course content for Blackboard integrations.
Image 1: Course Report with UNSAFE_HTML included to show past behavior.
As of this release, UNSAFE_HTML files automatically created in the content folder when using HTML snippets inside a Blackboard Document will be filtered out of the Institutional and Course reports. Previously, these files would show in the report but instructors were not able to fix the identified issues for missing language and title and often turned to other workarounds to remove these files from the course to remove them from the reports.
Opmerking
This change will remove all current and past UNSAFE_HTML files from consideration. Depending on how often these content items were used in a course, this may result in a slight increase or decrease in the course score based on the distribution of files, HTML and WYSIWYG content.
As part of a future release, we will look to avoid processing these files entirely when onboarding a course to help improve general performance and scanning.
Bug Fixes and Improvements
Fixed an issue in Blackboard integrations that caused a discrepancy with scoring for images when comparing the score within the Instructor Feedback of a Document to the score in the Course Accessibility Report when images were set to View Only or Download Only. The Course Accessibility Report was incorrectly missing previously applied alternative text and lowering the score despite this showing as fixed in the Instructor Feedback. Note this applies to images in Ultra Documents as part of the course and the Learning Object Repository.
Fixed an issue in the PDF Missing Language Quick Fix that allowed the Apply button to be clickable before the instructor selected a language.
Improved the styling on the Library Reference links in the Alternative Formats download window so that reference links show as clickable links and avoid potential contrast issues.
Ally 2.17.4 Release voor productie: 5 maart 2026
De taalvoorselectie is nu beschikbaar voor de Snelle oplossing voor ontbrekende taal voor PDF's.
Docenten die PDF's herstellen met ontbrekende talen in de Ally Instructor Feedback-sneloplossing kunnen nu profiteren van het feit dat de taal wordt gedetecteerd en vooraf wordt geselecteerd in de vervolgkeuzelijst om extra scrollen te voorkomen en tijd te besparen bij het herstellen van dit veelvoorkomende probleem.
De ingebouwde taaldetectie van Ally analyseert de PDF om waar mogelijk de juiste taal te bepalen. Als er geen taal wordt gedetecteerd, kunnen docenten nog steeds handmatig een taal selecteren om de correctie toe te passen en Ally de wijziging in de PDF te laten opslaan zoals verwacht.
Afbeelding 1: Quick Fix voor taal toevoegen met Engels geselecteerd
Moodle 5.1-plug-ins zijn nu beschikbaar
Als onderdeel van de voortdurende ondersteuning van Ally voor Moodle zijn de Ally-plug-ins voor Moodle 5.1 beschikbaar. Aanvullende details over de ondersteuning van Ally voor Moodle kunnen gevonden worden in de Ally Moodle-configuratiedocumentatie.
Opmerking
Ally maakt vertakkingen voor elke ondersteunde Moodle-versie als onderdeel van onze open-source plug-instrategie om gerichte ontwikkeling en het oplossen van bugs mogelijk te maken. Huidige versies van de plug-ins vind je in de corresponderende STABIELE vertakkingen in onze repository. Het wordt altijd aangeraden dat beheerders de stabiele vertakkingen gebruiken om er zeker van te zijn dat er geen nieuwe onbedoelde veranderingen worden geïntroduceerd wanneer plugins worden bijgewerkt.
Verholpen bugs en verbeteringen
Probleem opgelost in Blackboard waarbij docenten die het Cursustoegankelijkheidsrapport gebruikten om problemen in Documenten op te lossen, onverwacht inhoud konden verwijderen die ten onrechte als links werd geïdentificeerd bij het insluiten van HTML-blokken, audio en/of Video Studio-video's.
Probleem opgelost voor alle LMS-integraties in het Instellingenrapport waarbij de vervolgkeuzelijst Exporteren verborgen was op kleinere schermen en/of browserformaten.
Probleem opgelost voor alle LMS-integraties waarbij het toepassen van een snelle oplossing voor gebroken links voor WYSIWYG-inhoud met meerdere gebroken links tegelijkertijd soms resulteerde in een oneindig ladende spinner.
Diverse frontend-verbeteringen geïmplementeerd in de infrastructuur voor de preview van PDF-instructeursfeedback ter ondersteuning van onze voortdurende verbetering van PDF-reparatiefuncties.
Extra best practice-verbeteringen geïmplementeerd voor HTTP-verzoeken voor Canvas-integratie om het gebruik van User-Agent-headers te garanderen.
Ally 2.17.3 Release naar productie: 30 januari 2026
Verholpen bugs en verbeteringen
Probleem opgelost in Ally's Instructor Feedback voor gescande PDF-bestanden: nadat je "Leren hoe je PDF's herstelt" had geopend, bracht een klik op Terug je niet altijd terug naar de Instructor Feedback-weergave en was soms een tweede klik nodig.
Ally 2.17.2 Release naar productie: 15 januari 2026
Verholpen bugs en verbeteringen
Een probleem in het instellingrapport is opgelost waarbij de optie CSV downloaden verborgen was bij het exporteren vanaf het tabblad Cursussen als de zoekopdracht één of geen cursussen opleverde.
Er is een bug in het gebruiksrapport opgelost waarbij de knop Gebruiksrapport downloaden uitgeschakeld bleef nadat je een rapport had gedownload en vervolgens een nieuw datumbereik selecteerde.
Toegankelijkheidsprobleem met het toetsenbord opgelost in het Canvas-bestandengebied, waarbij de focus verloren ging tijdens het navigeren naar de toegankelijkheidsscore. Focus blijft nu zichtbaar wanneer je met het toetsenbord navigeert.