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.
Note: 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: 2026 Release Notes
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.