A student using a screen reader opens your lecture notes and reaches the diagram that ties the week together. The screen reader says one word: “diagram.jpg.” Until now, fixing that meant finding the original Word or PowerPoint file, or opening Adobe Acrobat, and then uploading the PDF again.

Ally’s newest PDF quick fix makes this much faster. When Ally flags images in a PDF that have no alternative text, you can now describe them directly in the Instructor Feedback panel. You don’t need to download the file or open another program. 

How it works

Select the Ally indicator on a flagged PDF and start fixing. For each flagged image, your options include:

• Write your own short description and add it to the PDF.

• If the image is purely visual, such as a border, divider, or ornament, mark it as decorative.

• Select Auto-generate Description to get an AI-suggested starting point. Ally looks at both the image and the PDF text around it, so the suggestion often reflects the image’s role in your document, not just what it shows.

Image: Add image descriptions in the Ally Instructor Feedback with an AI-suggested description.

TIP: Treat the auto-generated description as a first draft. A suggestion can tell a student that a chart shows four bars. Only you know that the point is that enrollment doubled. A quick edit to say why the image is there gives every student, not only screen reader users, the takeaway you intended.

Because Ally replaces the file in place, there’s no duplicate to clean up afterward. If you want to keep the original version, Ally provides a copy to download, or you can save a copy before you start.

More PDF quick fixes in Ally

Image descriptions join the PDF quick fixes Ally already offers: 

• Adding a document title

• Setting the document language

• Converting scanned pages to readable text with OCR

• Auto-tagging untagged PDFs. 

For a broader approach, including when to fix the source file instead, see Creating Accessible PDFs: 4 Tips for Success.

Ready to start? Open your Ally course report to find PDFs with flagged images.