Inside September 14th Ally Office Hours

# Accessibility

# Ally

Highlights and Takeaways

Katie Grennell, PhD.

Inside September 14th Ally Office Hours: Highlights and Takeaways

Another month, another great Ally Office Hours session! We walked through what's new, what's fixed, and what's coming next for Blackboard Ally, then spent the back half of the hour answering questions live from the community. Missed it, or want the highlights without watching the recording? Here's your recap.

As always: anything mentioned about roadmap timing is subject to change, so treat roadmap item targeted release timeframes dates as directional, not guaranteed.

Fix Your Content Day 2026 — Tuesday, November 10

Mark your calendars! Fix Your Content Day will be held on Tuesday, November 10th. Registration information is now available: FYCD27 Registration Page . We are expanding the communications pack typically available with registrants to help spread the word. Stay tuned!

New Content

Ally Product Pulse-September Edition : the monthly roundup of everything happening across Ally, recently shipped and on the horizon.

Ally for Instructors Microlearning Video Series : there's now a short video for every PDF quick fix Ally offers, with more topics planned. An Ally for Administrators course is also in development.

Curated training resource lists by LMS: a comprehensive, organized set of training materials for anyone responsible for supporting instructors using Ally, grouped from foundational concepts through individual features. Available on the Community and updated on an ongoing basis: Ally Training Resources for Instructors using Blackboard , Ally Training Resources for Instructors using D2L Brightspace , Ally Training Resources Instructors using Canvas , Ally Training Resources for Instructors using Moodle .

Promoting Alternative Formats to Students : a new blog post with ready-to-use messaging templates you can drop straight into an LMS announcement or email, syllabus statements, suggestions for organizing your course in your LMS, and more.

What We Actually Get Asked about Accessibility : a new blog post drawn from the "Ask an Accessibility Exert" panel at July's BbT conference, led by Dr. Amy Lomellini alongside panelists from several institutions.

August Ally Roadmap: if you missed the August 18th roadmap session, we have three different ways for you to catch up: Ally Roadmap Recap Blog (August 2026) , Ally Roadmap Slide Deck (August 2026) , and Ally Roadmap Recording (August 2026) .

Upcoming Events

Event	Date
Ally User Group (September Meeting)	Thu, Sept 24 — 10am ET
Ally in Practice: Prioritizing Accessibility Improvements for Instructors	Wed, Sept 16 — 10am & 2pm ET Ally in Practice (September 14th, 2026) Recap Ally in Practice (September 14th, 2026) Recording
Ally in Practice: An Administrator's Guide to Institutional Reporting and Remediation Prioritization	Tue, Oct 20 — 10am & 2pm ET Ally in Practice (October 20th, 2026) Option 1 Registration Link Ally in Practice (October 20th, 2026) Option 2 Registration Link

Ally in Practice is a new monthly enablement webinar series alternating between instructor/course designer topics and administrator topics. Every session is recorded and open to anyone — no need to register based on your title.

Release Updates

The team closed out three alt-text and image bugs specific to Ally within Blackboard, reported by several of you over the last month:

Images in Blackboard tests: alt text behavior for images embedded in tests has been corrected.

Course Accessibility Report Alt-text Behavior: the reported behavior for alt text and images has been addressed.

Image blog alt text not saving: alt text fixed through Ally, whether via Instructor Feedback or the Course Accessibility Report, has resumed saving back correctly to the image block in Blackboard documents.

Important: these fixes are forward-facing only. Ally cannot retroactively repopulate alt text that was affected before the fixes. If you're still seeing any of this behavior going forward, please open a support ticket.

Other bug fixes across releases

2.19.5: Fixed the institutional usage report not applying the department ID filter correctly in both the UI and export — this affected all LMSs.

Fixed an alternative-format conversion issue where the first word after a bullet point was sometimes stripped during HTML processing.

2.19.4 (Canvas): Fixed an edge case where Ally metadata (alt text, decorative status, library references) failed to carry over during course export/import/copy when files were deleted and replaced mid-process.

2.19.4 (Canvas): Fixed score indicators disappearing in the new Files experience depending on screen size or resolution.

All LMSs: Fixed broken-link checking incorrectly flagging valid links as broken, depending on how they were inserted into rich content.

Q&A Highlights

Auto-tagging PDFs: live since July 13th, this feature only tags untagged PDFs, and approval is currently all-or-nothing. Roadmap: editable tag types are coming to the approval workflow, with tag editing on existing tagged PDFs being explored separately. Reading order isn't part of this work, since Ally can't yet judge whether reading order is accurate.

Disabling the PDF library reference: this is an admin feature flag, and turning it off disables it institution-wide.

Scanned PDFs, OCR, and table headers: OCR'd PDFs get basic tags but are flagged as scanned (not for missing tags), and auto-tagging won't extend to scans. The elevated OCR failure rate from the week of Aug 24 has dropped and stayed low — let support know if you're still seeing errors. Separately, if Ally isn't recognizing Word table headers, confirm Repeating Header Row is checked while the header row itself (not the whole table) is selected; if it's still flagged, file a support case.

Quick fixes failing, and "guidance not yet available": PDF quick fixes usually fail on a file-permissions issue, not Blackboard-specific, and worth checking on Canvas, D2L, or Moodle too; note in your ticket whether the user is actually enrolled in the course. As for missing guidance: OCR'd PDFs cap at 67% since quality can't be guaranteed (extending to 100% is roadmapped, ~3–6 months out), and a handful of other issues — often HTML color-contrast problems — still lack guidance and are being closed one at a time.

Open forum: quick highlights

Color contrast: Low contrast isn't always an error, in medical or fine-art images, high contrast can cause pain for some people with disabilities. The team liked the idea of an on-demand high-contrast alternate version and invited it to the Idea Exchange.

Course reports show 0% instead of N/A for publisher-link-only courses; team asked for the case number to dig in.

Blank/black HTML issue previews in Canvas — check whether the WYSIWYG scoring icon is enabled; file a bug ticket if it persists.

Bulk "mark as decorative" isn't roadmapped — the team is wary of faculty over-marking images, but wants more examples of the pain point.

Inconsistent PowerPoint alt-text flagging may relate to how images were inserted or the PowerPoint version — send a support ticket with examples.

Content Collection overwrite doesn't refresh Ally scores across modules sharing a file — no fix yet; the team is revisiting as Learning Object Repository use grows.

Hope to see you at the next Ally Office Hours on Monday, October 12th!

Comments (0)

Popular