Looking Ahead: Highlights from the Ally Roadmap Session at Building Blackboard Together
Standing room only
At Building Blackboard Together in Dallas, the Ally roadmap session drew a standing-room-only crowd of educators, instructional designers, accessibility specialists, and administrators eager to learn more about what's ahead for Ally and to hear how their feedback is being put directly back into the product. Presented in a Top 10 countdown format, the session highlighted the most exciting innovations in a roadmap shaped by community feedback and focused on 3 key pain points for our users.
- Those pesky PDFs – prevalent and often problematic; instructors continue to look for easier and more efficient remediation options that help simplify the process and save time.
- Reporting and visibility – critical in today’s environment; admins and leadership need to track not only scores but progress to support more accessible content creation for students.
- Personalized Experiences – limited options blocking progress; students and instructors are consistently looking for more personalized and engaging experiences that work best for their individual preference.
As a reminder, our roadmap commitments and timeframes are subject to change at any time and are not meant to be set in stone. Each roadmap item is marked to indicate whether the capability is currently available in Ally or planned for a future release.
Big Announcements – What's Available Now?
- PDF Auto Tagging (Available Now!): Ally's newest PDF Quick Fix helps instructors remediate untagged PDFs through an automated tagging process while remaining in full control of the process to improve the content for all students. (We aren’t stopping here! Future potential enhancements under consideration include improved previews, expanded in-line remediation, tag review capabilities, and more.)
- New Ally Usage Report (Available Now!): The New Usage Report introduces a new user interface with interactive visualizations, filtering, and drill-down capabilities that help institutions quickly gain insights into Ally usage, with export options still available.
What’s Coming Next?
- AI Alt Text for PDFs: planned as the next PDF Quick Fix, this will extend Ally's AI Alt Text Assistant to images contained within PDF documents, providing instructors with an inline remediation experience for adding alternative text.
- PDF Decorative Image Workflows: to guide instructors in identifying and managing decorative images.
- New Course Accessibility Report: to help instructors more easily understand and improve accessibility within their courses. Enhancements under consideration include a clearer distinction between file and WYSIWYG content issues, streamlined navigation, file location information that helps pinpoint exactly where content resides within a course, and potential insights into student alternative format usage.
- OCRed PDF Guidance: to help instructors identify and adress accessibility issues that may remain after OCR processing.
- Blackboard Document Support: focused on expanding Ally capabilities within the Blackboard Rich Content Editor, including instructor feedback, alternative formats, and improved image and alternative text workflows.
- New Ally Enhanced Reader Format: focused on providing students with a more personalized reading experience through features such as word emphasis, a potential reading ruler, and customizable fonts, text sizes, and spacing designed to enhance focus and readability.
The Bigger Long-Term Bets
- New System Overview Report: to provide a consolidated view of Ally data across systems with multiple institutions, surfacing accessibility trends, key metrics, and common accessibility issues, helping inform an institution’s overarching accessibility strategy and priorities.
- Updated PDF Support: focused on researching expanded support for additional PDF standards and formats, including PDF/UA, PDF 2.0, and LaTeX-generated PDFs.
Thank You for the Conversation
The standing-room-only turnout was a reminder that accessibility remains an important and evolving conversation across the Ally community. Thank you to everyone who joined the Ally roadmap session at Building Blackboard Together. These initiatives are not possible without all of you in the Ally Community. We look forward to continuing the conversation and sharing updates as these initiatives move forward.
And if a standing-room-only session sparked a little FOMO, fear not! We’ll be hosting another Ally roadmap session on Tuesday, August 18th at 10:00 am ET, where we’ll provide additional updates on what’s ahead for Ally, and answer questions from the community. Consider it your FOMO safety net: the session will be recorded and shared in the Blackboard Community afterward for anyone who can't join us live.
Register for the next Ally roadmap
Please note that exact release times are subject to change.
FAQs
What is Blackboard Ally?
Blackboard Ally is an LMS-agnostic accessibility solution, working across Blackboard, Canvas, Moodle and D2L Brightspace to make digital course content more accessible. It checks content against WCAG standards, guides instructors through fixes, and automatically creates alternative formats so students can access materials in whatever way suits them best..
What new accessibility features are coming to Blackboard Ally?
The latest roadmap focuses on the three areas: easier PDF remediation, better reporting, and more personalized experiences. Automated PDF tagging and a redesigned Usage Report are already live. Next up are AI Alt Text Assistant for images within PDFs, a rebuilt Course Accessibility Report, OCR guidance, deeper integration with the Blackboard Rich Content Editor, and a new Enhanced Reader format for students. Looking ahead, Ally is exploring a System Overview Report for institutions running multiple systems, and expanded support for PDF standards like PDF/UA, PDF 2.0, and LaTeX-generated PDFs.
How does Blackboard Ally improve PDF accessibility?
Ally already fixes missing PDF titles, missing language metadata, and OCR issues on scanned PDFs, and now offers automated tagging for untagged PDFs too, all while keeping instructors in control. Next on the roadmap: AI-generated alt text for images inside PDFs, better handling of decorative images, and guidance for issues that survive OCR.
What is AI Alt Text Assistant in Blackboard Ally?
AI Alt Text Assistant is Ally's tool for suggesting image descriptions automatically. Instructors click to generate a description, then review and edit it before it's applied. It's off by default so institutions can align it with their own AI policies, and none of the data is used to train models. It'll soon extend to images inside PDFs as well.
How does Blackboard Ally support accessible learning?
Ally flags accessibility issues, guides instructors through fixing them, and automatically produces alternative formats so students get materials in whatever format works for them, without instructors having to recreate anything by hand. Instructors stay in control throughout, reviewing and approving changes rather than having them applied automatically, which keeps quality and context intact while still saving significant manual effort. A new Enhanced Reader format is also in the works, giving students more control over things like fonts, spacing and a reading ruler.
What accessibility reporting features are available in Blackboard Ally?
Ally offers a Course Accessibility Report and institutional reports covering usage, alternative format launches and instructor feedback. The Usage Report has just been redesigned with interactive visuals and drill-down filtering, and a rebuilt Course Accessibility Report is coming next with clearer navigation and file location details. Down the line, a System Overview Report will pull data together across institutions.
How does Blackboard Ally help instructors create accessible content?
It reviews content as it's uploaded, scores it, and explains clearly what needs fixing, so instructors don't need accessibility expertise to make real improvements. Tools like automated PDF tagging and AI alt text suggestions for images in PDFs do a lot of the heavy lifting, without the instructor ever ceding control of their content and courses.
What was announced during the Ally roadmap session at Building Blackboard Together?
The session was built around three themes: PDFs, reporting, and personalized experiences. Automated PDF tagging and a redesigned Usage Report are already available. Coming next are AI Alt Text Assistant for images within PDFs, decorative image handling for images within PDFs, a rebuilt Course Accessibility Report, OCR guidance, deeper Rich Content Editor support, and a new Enhanced Reader format. Looking ahead, Ally is exploring a System Overview Report for institutions running multiple systems, and expanded support for PDF standards like PDF/UA, PDF 2.0, and LaTeX-generated PDFs. All roadmap items are subject to change. A follow-up webinar runs Tuesday 18 August at 10am ET.