Best Practices for Accessibility in Canvas

 Navigation and Organization

An accessible Canvas course allows students to navigate and find specific information with ease. A streamlined and intuitive organization and clear labels will help all students access their content.

• To make your Pages and Modules uncluttered, keep them as simple as possible.
• Clearly label all content so that students know where to go
• Chunk information into shorter segments
• Be consistent with course navigation, organization, and naming conventions
• Allow students to get to content in as few clicks as possible

 Headers and Text

Canvas has a variety of built-in styles and layouts that allow for accessible design. All text in your course, including main body text, headers, and links, should be as clear and concise as possible. 

• Use different heading levels (Heading 1, 2, 3, etc. to clearly mark sections of your course and indicate how content is ordered and related.
• Use the heading labels in Modules to mark distinct sections.
• Always use a label for link text; never post only the link unless there is sufficient context or the link itself is short and provides the context
• Use descriptive labels for link text. Avoid using "click here" or "link to" as labels.
• Create bulleted and numbered lists using the Canvas Rich Content Editor. The built-in lists provide a navigational structure for those students using screen readers. 

 Visual Content (Images, Graphs, etc.)

There are four main types of images: decorative, informational, active, and text-based. Different accessibility considerations should be used depending on the image type.

1. Decorative Images: the image serves mainly to make the course visually appealing or is redundant to the accompanying text. These are the least crucial since they do not give additional information.

2. Informational Images: the image gives new information not already covered in the text.

3. Active Images: the image is interactive in some way. Examples include image links and buttons that open new content, such as a website or accompanying image.

4. Text-Based Images: the image consists solely or primarily of text and the purpose is to convey the text-based information.

Any images in your course need to be high-resolution with good color contrast for best visibility. Students with visual disabilities will require text to inform them about the image's purpose and context.

Accessibility guidelines for visual content include:

• Always add alternative text to images. 
• For decorative images, use alt="" for the alt text
• For text-based image, the alt text should be the same as the text in the image
• For images that serve as links, the alt text should give the link context.

 Audio and Video

Audiovisual multimedia can present accessibility concerns for students with hearing disabilities. Accommodations such as captions give equal access to this content. They can also give students without disabilities a better learning experience; for example, if they are not native English speakers, are sitting in a noisy room, or simply learn better through reading.

All audio content, including recorded or live lecure, should have a full text equivalent transcript (for audio) or captions (for video). (audio recordings added to powerpoint slides and audio tracks on video recordings) must have a complete text equivalent in the form of transcripts (audio) or captions (video). 

• Captions: Use Canvas Studio to generate captions for video uploads. Captions need to be reviewed and edited for accuracy.  
• Transcripts: For audio files like podcasts and instructor-recorded assessment feedback, use a transcription tool like Google Voice or the dictation tool in MS Word. Play the audio loud enough for the transcription tool to "hear" it, then edit as needed for accuracy.
• Recommendations for live online classes:
  
  • Use the live captioning tool in Zoom
  • Have only one person speaking at a time (use the "hand raise" tool in Zoom)
  • Ask all speakers to self-identify before speaking
  • Ask speakers to repeat their statement if there are any audio issues

 Files and Attachments

Files and attachments that you add to your course for students view or download should also be accessible. Most common programs, like MS Word and PowerPoint, have accessibility checkers for their file formats.

• As a general rule, add alt text descriptions to all images. Do not use PDF images (such as scanned texts or pictures) because they cannot be read by a screen reader.
• Word documents:
  • Use the latest version of Microsoft Word and run the Microsoft Office accessibility checker Links to an external site..
• PowerPoint slides:
  • Use the latest version of PowerPoint and run the accessibility checker.
  • Stick to built-in slide formats versus designing your own, because the pre-configured boxes provide a screen-readable structure.
  • Organize content in the order it should be read.
• Excel sheets:
  • Avoid empty cells and excess colors/design in the spreadsheet.
  • Avoid using images, long sentences and paragraphs. Put this content in a separate format, such as a Canvas page or a Word document.
  • As a rule, use Excel strictly for organizing data.
• PDFs:
  • Create your PDF content in the latest version of Microsoft Word and run the accessibility checker.
  • After correcting any errors, convert the Word document to PDF in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC.
  • Run the accessibility checker in Adobe.
  • All PDFs need to have editable text or be converted using OCR (optical character recognition), as screen readers will interpret PDF scans as images.

 Other Considerations

You may wish to use other technology tools in addition to the Canvas LMS in your teaching. Some third-party educational tools can integrate with the Canvas system. However, they are not part of the main Canvas system and may have different features and functions. You might use other external tools such as Padlet, Kahoot, or Poll Everywhere that can be accessed via another website other than Canvas. These tools have their own settings as well.

You may need to carefully learn the features of these tools to make them fully accessible. The good news is that the same basic principles for Universal Design apply to any technology tool. In learning the best practices for accessibility in Canvas, you can take those skills and principles and apply them to other systems.