Prepare your Ally export for the Accessibility Reporting tool

Your Ally export

Before you start

Your files come from Ally's Institutional Report: open Export and download the report. Ally gives you one ZIP archive holding seven CSV files. Upload that archive in the Ally export archive box and this page takes the six files it reads straight out of it — courses.csv, terms.csv and departments_years.csv, which it needs, and years.csv, months.csv and departments_terms.csv, which add accessibility history to the Trends view. The seventh, departments_months.csv, is not used. Every file must come from the same export: if they do not, this page stops rather than produce data that shows raw ids where names belong.

Opening a ZIP needs an internet connection, because this page fetches a ZIP reader the first time you use one. Choosing the six CSV files yourself needs no connection at all, and stays available whether or not the archive route works.

What to do

Upload the ZIP archive Ally produced. This page fills the six CSV file boxes from it and says which file went where, so you can change one if you need to. You can choose those six files yourself instead.
Select Generate. This page checks everything it builds before it offers you anything to download.
Download ally-course-payload.json.
Host that file at an https address your colleagues' browsers can read — a GitHub repository or GitHub Pages site works with no configuration — then enter that address in Set Up, under "Fetch course data from a URL".

If the data is only for you, you do not need this page at all: upload the same CSV files in Set Up instead, under "Upload course data from your Ally export".

Your Ally export archive (the .zip Ally produced - this fills the six CSV file boxes for you)

Or choose the six files yourself

Terms (terms.csv - required; term ids and their names)

Departments (departments_years.csv - required; department ids and their names)

Courses (courses.csv - required; the courses people search for)

Leave out archived courses Courses whose name contains “[archived]” are left out. They are about 63% of a typical export and cannot be remediated, so leaving them out makes the generated file roughly three times smaller. Untick to keep every course searchable.

Accessibility history (optional)

years.csv, months.csv and departments_terms.csv, together with the terms and departments files above, generate ally-trends-data.js and add accessibility history to the payload, so the Trends view can show an institution its own scores over time. All three are needed: with any one missing, no history is generated and the status says which.

Years CSV (years.csv - scores by academic year)

Months CSV (months.csv - scores by month)

Departments by term CSV (departments_terms.csv - scores by department and term)

Upload your Ally export archive, or choose the CSV files, to begin.

Your files

Nothing here can be downloaded until this page has loaded everything it built and checked it works. The first file is the one to host; the rest are for the script route described under each of them.

One archive holding all four files - ally-course-payload.json, ally-lookup-data.js, ally-courses-data.js and ally-trends-data.js - so the script route does not need four separate downloads. Building it needs an internet connection, for the same ZIP reader the archive upload uses. Files this run did not generate are left out.

This is the file to download and host. Put it at an https address your colleagues' browsers can read, then enter that address in Set Up under "Fetch course data from a URL". It is data only, so it runs no code on the pages that fetch it.

No data generated yet

Term and department names, for the script route only. That route loads JavaScript from your folder, which runs whoever controls that folder's code inside the tool, beside every key the tool has stored for you. Use it only for a folder your own institution controls, and prefer the JSON file above. Each of these modules needs ally-scripts/core/ally-data-runtime.js loaded before it.

No data generated yet