Issue and Purpose

The purpose of Canvas's Accessibility Checker tool is to help ensure Canvas content is accessible to students with disabilities (SWD). For example, visual content with low contrast may be impossible or difficult read by students with low vision. The checker tool can discover some (but not all!) accessibility issues. It will report on common content mistakes (e.g., missing text description for an image) that can then be corrected by the author. The checker is built into Canvas page editing, so is easy to apply.

The Accessibility Checker button is part of the the Canvas page editing toolbar

Importance

The following videos demonstrate how essential it is to make contents accessible to SWD students. According to a study about online learning, more than 80% of educational pages are not accessible for people with disabilities.

1) Needs voiced by our SWD student panel.

Barriers SWD need help with

2) Accessible page vs inaccessible page

DO-IT video on making page compatible with Screen Reader

Strategy

Here are six core ideas to help make Canvas pages accessible
Principle 1: Use Headings - 1:02

Principle 2: Use Alternative (alt) Text for Images - 4:41

Principle 3: Use Tables for Data and Information - Not Layouts - 6:23

Principle 4: Use Descriptive Text for Links - 7:58

Principle 5: Canvas Accessibility Checker - 10:27

Principle 6: Caption Videos

(Attribution: These are from HowToCanvas)

How to

Accessibility checker will automatically check if the following rules are met in your page: Adjacent links, Headings, Image alt text& filename, Image alt length, Text contrast, List, Sequential heading, Table Caption,Table header.

This guide demonstrate how to use the Accessibility checker on Canvas in details. Please note the accessibility checker exists also for discussion board when rich content editing is allowed.

The following video also gave a demo of using accessibility checker.

Notes to your students

Discussion