What is accessibility?

Wikipedia defines accessibility as "the design of products, devices, services, or environments so as to be usable by people with disabilities." The goal of web accessibility is to provide all people with the opportunity to access the information and features found on the internet. Accessibility is an important aspect of our course development and teaching processes because it provides each student equal access and opportunities.

There are various types of disability for which a student (or caregiver) may need accessibility accommodations in our courses. The main categories that we want to address in our classrooms are:

Visual: Blindness, low vision, color-blindness
Hearing: Deafness and hard-of-hearing
Motor: Inability to use a mouse, slow response time, limited fine motor control
Cognitive: Learning disabilities, distractibility, inability to remember or focus on large amounts of information

Accessibility within education is a very important concept because it allows students with disabilities to access and interact with course content, regardless their conditions. A course that is designed around aspects of accessibility will allow all students to actively participate in course activities and access the information they need to excel.

Five Important Accessibility Factors to Consider

To ensure that all students and caregivers that access your courses can fully participate, it's important to do the following:

Use Headings

When you create content in Canvas, it is important to mark up the page using the built-in style options, found in the Canvas Rich Content Editor (RCE). By default, the text will be styled as "paragraph". If you are creating sections on your page, you may be tempted to distinguish the headings by using BOLD, italics, or changing the color and size of the text. However, the proper approach is to format the sections as headings.

From the format dropdown in the RCE, you can choose from Headings 2-4. By default the formatting will be determined by a predetermined style guide, but you can go in and change the properties in the HTML editor, such as the color, size, alignment, and so on. You can also apply Heading 5-6 in HTML if you choose.

In Canvas, the Heading 1 is always the title of the assignment/discussion/page, etc. So the first heading you would use on your page is Heading 2. When using headings, it is important to maintain a properly nested order.

Heading 2 should be used to delineate the main sections on your page. Heading 3 is a subsection of a heading 2.
Heading 4 should only follow a heading 3, and should not appear directly under a heading 2 or as the first heading on your page.

These guidelines will help facilitate screen readers as they navigate through your pages.

Use Alternative (alt) Text for Images

image with alt text

Images are often important for supplementing or clarifying aspects of a Canvas page. Ensure that your images have descriptive alt text. Good alt text will describe the content of an image in a way that someone who is blind would be able to comprehend. A key to good alt text is to be comprehensive in describing the image, while also being concise.

In order to enter the alt text for your image, click the image and select Image Options. In the image options pane, you will be able to input your description in the alt text box. If your image is purely ornamental and does not have any substantive content to support the Canvas page, you may indicate such by checking the box Mark as decorative. It is perfectly fine for us to use banners and images to increase the aesthetic appeal of our pages, but we just need to indicate such.

image options.jpg

Note: Don’t be tempted to use a phrase such as: “image of…” to describe your image. The screen reader that is interpreting your Canvas page has already determined that it is an image. Instead, focus on describing the content of the image, whether it is delineating a process or displaying important information.

Some examples of appropriate alt text might include:

Student walking up a staircase while holding books
Raindrops on a leaf

Avoid inserting images of scanned documents or screenshots

While it may save time to screenshot text from a worksheet or insert an image of a scanned document, this is not best practice. Screen readers, including Immersive Reader and Snap and Read cannot read the text of a screenshot or a scanned document. If you need to include text, including Math Equations, it is best to use the Rich Content Editor to type the text, or use the Equation Editor found under the "Insert" menu.

For example, the following is a screenshot of a website with text. Try using Snap and Read or the Immersive Reader (see the button at the top of this page) to have this text read aloud.

screenshot of text

Use Descriptive Text for Links

There are correct and incorrect ways to add website URLs to your Canvas pages. The incorrect way to add a URL is to copy the link and paste it onto your Canvas RCE. The correct way is to highlight the word or words that you wish to hyperlink, and add the URL that way. navigating the hyperlink menu

This is not an ideal practice as the screen reader will read the entire URL twice.

When you have either used the RCE to create a hyperlink, the Insert Hyperlink dialogue box will appear. The main elements will be the Text to display and the Link boxes.

The Text to display box will consist of the text on your document that will be hyperlinked, and the Link box refers to the location where the user will go when they click on the link. Avoid using generic and non-descriptive text, such as:

Click here
Here
Read more

It is a good practice to avoid phrases such as or similar to "click here" altogether, as they tend to be redundant. For example, instead of a phrase reading "Click here to access the readings for this week", this can instead be shortened to "This week's readings". Aim to be descriptive when linking URLs in Canvas. And again, the worst thing for you to do is to simply drop an entire URL, saying click here: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Basics-Guide/What-are-the-Canvas-accessibility-standards/ta-p/1564 <—Very bad form!

Canvas Accessibility Checker

The Universal Design Online Content Inspection Tool, or UDOIT, is a great tool that will check the accessibility of your entire Canvas course.

accessibility icon

Canvas has a native accessibility checker built right into the RCE that will allow you to assess the contents of the page you are editing. This is a great resource for ensuring that your Canvas pages and content meet accessibility standards.

accessibility checker image

This checker will diagnose various components of your page, such as:

alt text and image file names
links
color contrast
tables - captions, headers, etc.
headings
etc.

When your page content meets the criteria of the accessibility checker then you will receive a celebratory confirmation that there are no accessibility issues detected.

complete accessibility checker

Bonus: Video Captions

Webcam and screencast videos are a fantastic way to share content and engage students. You can use Canvas Studio to create and share videos and include Video Captions.

You can upload or record videos into your Canvas courses and the platform allows you to request or upload captions to your media files. Canvas can create captions in several languages. For an overview of captioning in Canvas Studio refer to the guide: How do I use the Canvas Studio Caption Request Tool to add captions to a media file?

Additional Help

For more information about Accessibility standards in Canvas, check out this Canvas Guide: What are the Canvas accessibility standards?