As you create and refine your courses, you will need to focus on how to make your course accessible to all learners. This means all students must have the opportunity to acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as students without disabilities, with substantially equivalent ease of use, per the U.S. Department of Education. In exploring course accessibility, you may find the following tools and resources helpful.
Ally
A product of Blackboard that supports accessibility in course materials. Ally is fully integrated with Canvas. Ally will scan course pages and files in your Canvas course and produce an accessibility score, explanation of accessibility issues and how to fix them. When you add pages and files to Canvas, Ally will produce alternative formats you can download. Currently, supported format include: Tagged PDF version, HTML version, ePub version, electronic braille version, and audio version. For more information, view this playlist of Ally help videos.
Recent enhancements to the Ally app makes the accessibility report link appear in the course left navigation . The report provides you a comprehensive summary of accessibility issues for the entire collection of files stored in your course. For example, it provides you the overall accessibility score of your course, amount of files by type, and a list of all the files along with the accessibility score for each one of them.
Note:
- Ally does not check the accessibility of Canvas content (pages) you create within the "Rich Content Editor". Please use the Accessibility Checker in the Rich Content Editor" to make your course fully accessible.
- If your course has files that you do not use, please consider deleting or removing them from the course so that you do not have to fix accessibility issues. The eLearning Team can always create a development shell you can use to store content or files as needed.
Canvas Accessibility Checker
In the text editor within the Canvas platform, there is a built-in accessibility checker. This tool scans any content put into the rich content editor (where you put in your text, images, etc.) for potential accessibility concerns such as alt text for images, use of headings, text size contrast, and more. For more information on how to use this tool, view the Canvas Accessibility Checker guide.
Microsoft Accessibility Checker
Since many of us create our course materials within Microsoft Office tools such as Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, it is helpful to to review material accessibility directly in these tools before uploading them to Canvas. Built into Microsoft Office tools, under the Review tab, there will be an option to Check Accessibility. This tool will help you identify and resolve accessibility issues in your content, such as text color contrast, alternative text, reading order, and more.
Other Resources
Submit a Help Request or additional assistance.