Office Hours

October 14, 2026

Inside Ally Office Hours (October 12th, 2026)

# Accessibility

# Ally

Highlights and Takeaways

Katie Grennell, PhD.

Inside October 12th Ally Office Hours: Highlights and Takeaways

Missed Ally’s most recent office hours from October 12^th, or just want the highlights without the full recording? This recap walks through everything we covered: new content, upcoming events, release updates, a special sneak peek, and your questions.

New Content

We've been busy this past month, and it's showing up in some very real progress.

We're steadily expanding the Ally Communication and Adoption Toolkit . The resource on promoting alternative formats to students now lives in the toolkit itself! More is on the way, too. Soon we'll add examples of inaccessible content you can use in your own demos and trainings. We'll share an announcement as soon as it's ready.

The October edition of the Ally Product Pulse is out, pumpkin emoji and all. It's your monthly roundup of everything happening with Ally, plus upcoming events. This month's Did You Know section spotlights a new film, Being Heumann, based on her memoir (conveniently named Being Heumann, one of the great leaders of the disability rights movement. It's expected on Apple TV sometime in late October or November.

Ally in Practice recap: earlier in September, we hosted our very first Ally in Practice session. This new enablement series is virtual, free, and open to anyone, with the audience rotating between instructors and administrators. With classes back in session, we kicked things off with instructors in Prioritizing Accessibility Improvements for Instructors. It was all about strategy: using Ally to plan your remediation strategy and answer the question we all love so much, where do I begin? If you missed it, the Ally in Practice recap blog and session recording are both available. And to everyone who engaged with our first session, thank you!

Upcoming Events

Fix Your Content Day is back. Same idea as always: 24 hours, one goal, fix as much content as we possibly can. Registration is now open ! Additionally, we’ve also expanded our communications pack to help you plan. Below is a look at what’s been added:

New social media campaign

New messaging countdown series

New coordinator planning and communication timeline

New admin prioritization toolkit

Expanded strategies and recommendations

Still included: email and LMS templates, how-to videos, a one-pager, FAQs, rules, and the Ally Adoption Toolkit. Get the full communications pack .

Join us for the Digital Teaching Symposium, a free, online event dedicated to educators. Reach. Teach. Demonstrate. It's a day to share ideas, learn from fellow educators, and bring fresh inspiration back to your courses. To register, visit https://www.blackboard.com/digital-teaching-symposium .

Our next Ally User Group meeting is coming up on Thursday, November 19^th at 10:00 am EST. You can Register for the Ally User Group meeting , and also keep the conversation going anytime in the Ally User Group Community .

Save the data: Building Blackboard Together 2027! We're so excited to share that Building Blackboard Together 2027 is heading to San Francisco, California, July 13 to 15, 2027. Registration is already open at https://conference.blackboard.com/.

Ally in Practice for administrators: Tuesday, October 20^th: as promised, our next Ally in Practice session turns the spotlight to our lovely administrators. An Administrator's Guide to Institutional Reporting and Remediation Prioritization takes up to three data points from the Ally institutional report and walks through what you can actually do with them, with best practices and ideas along the way. We're running the same session twice to accommodate different time zones, and just like with our first session, we will share the recording and a blog recap afterwards.

Release Updates

Ally 2.20 was released this week, and it's a big one. Here's what's in it, plus a look back at highlights from 2.19.8 and 2.19.7. For every detail, check out the 2026 Ally release notes .

Ally 2.20 (Oct 12th)

PDF Alt Text and the AI Alt Text Assistant: alt text support now extends to PDFs, with help from the AI Alt Text Assistant.

Reorganized configuration feature flags: a new, reorganized layout for feature flags in your configuration settings.

Blackboard content editor improvements: new improvements for Ally in the Blackboard content editor.

Accessibility bug fixes and improvements across the product.

Missing token error resolved for Canvas and Brightspace.

Special call-out for D2L Brightspace: we fixed an issue that caused some departments to disappear from the Directory tab of the Institutional Report when using custom org units. A smaller subset of D2L integrations may also see a course load issue tied to these org units that keeps the Institutional Report from loading. We're monitoring closely now that the fix is in place, and we'll release a priority hotfix if the course loading issue persists.

Ally 2.19.8

Fixed an issue in Blackboard where instructors using the Course Accessibility Report to fix issues in documents could remove content incorrectly identified as links when embedding LTI video links, including YuJa, Echo360, Panopto, Kaltura, and other third-party videos.

Fixed an issue in the Canvas integration where custom CSS conflicted with Ally CSS, causing an error when viewing the Instructor Feedback or Course Report Preview.

Ally 2.19.7

Updated the AI Alt Text Assistant to take advantage of several improvements in the underlying AWS Bedrock AI models.

Fixed a bug in the Institutional Report Directory tab that sometimes showed course and item counts as 0 until you refreshed the report.

Made several improvements to how Ally processes large volumes of events behind the scenes.

Coming Soon!

New alternative format dropping soon! Clear some space in your rotation, because Ally has a brand-new alternative format dropping this fall. We’re keeping the track list under wraps for just a little longer, but we can share the vibe: focus, comfort, and control. Think of this as the teaser before the big release. Keep an eye out for the official drop, because you'll want this one on repeat. Fun fact: the album drop idea came from students of St. Mary’s College. In August, Chris met with a student team who suggested launching the new format like an album drop, and Katie brought the idea to life with the 80s-themed artwork. One thing we can’t promise is a midnight release.

Sneak Peeks

System Level Overview Report: Chris gave us an early look at the System Level Overview Report, built for systems that run multiple institutions on the same LMS instance. Today, when each school in a system has its own LMS instance, each one also has its own Ally institutional report, with no single view across the system.

A new System tab in the institutional report brings together the institutions in your system, with the overview you already know: trends over time, totals, and an overall accessibility score.

This first step covers aggregate totals and scores only. It doesn't include the drill-down levels of the institutional report, such as course or feedback details.

Does your system share one LMS instance, such as one Canvas with sub-accounts? Then your existing institutional report already gives you this system-level view, because Ally picks up the sub-account hierarchy. The new report is for systems with separate instances, including systems that run more than one LMS.

It's still early and not live yet. The demo combined two of our demo sites into a sample system.

Q&A

No questions came in through the form this month, so we opened the floor. Here’s what you asked.

Can I pull Ally data by instructor? Not natively. Ally doesn't capture instructor information, by design. We avoid collecting personal information we don't need, and we don't want Ally reports to feel like a way to track faculty. If you need instructor-level reporting, export your Ally data by course ID and join it with instructor data from your student information system or another source. Institutions use tools like Blackboard Illuminate, Power BI with the Ally reporting API, or Snowflake for this.

Running an internal Fix Your Content Day competition? The same approach works for a leaderboard: export by course, then map each course ID to its instructor. It's the most straightforward route, and it saves a lot of manual spreadsheet work.

Why does Ally flag missing headings on a PDF made from PowerPoint when every slide has a title? It usually comes down to how the PDF was exported. Not every export method tags slide titles as headings. Save as PDF usually does, while Print to PDF is less reliable. Try both on the same PowerPoint and compare the results. Ally scores the same file the same way every time. If one file shows different results for different people, submit a support ticket for that file.

What if generating alt text or marking an image as decorative fails? Ally saves a new version of the file each time you fix it, so it needs to be able to write back to where the file lives. A permissions issue there can cause a failure. The 2.20 release also rolls out by region, so try again once the release notes are posted, and submit a ticket if it keeps happening.

Will instructors see separate scores for files and WYSIWYG content? Yes. That's part of our concept for the next version of the instructor course report, which we first showed at the conference this summer. The overall score stays, with scores broken out by content type and suggested starting points for instructors who aren't sure where to begin.

Can scores exclude unpublished content? It's on our roadmap as a filter, so instructors could view their score for published content, unpublished content, or both. We started with Canvas and Blackboard, but reliably determining what's published in Canvas has been a blocker, and we don't want to release a filter that isn't reliable. D2L and Moodle are still to come.

Why does Ally score unpublished content at all? Content that sits in a course could reach students someday. If you're not using it, consider deleting it.

See you Next Time!

Thanks so much to everyone who joined us this month. Have a question you'd like us to cover next time? Submit it ahead of time through our office hours form, or bring it live and drop it in the chat or come off mute. The recording and slide deck from this session are available now, and you can register for upcoming office hours anytime.

Happy almost-Halloween, and we'll see you at the next office hours on Monday, November 9^th!

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