Canvas Accessibility Checklist

Canvas Accessibility Checklist

This checklist resource contains areas to check for Canvas course accessibility, links to tutorials and information to make your Canvas courses more accessible and usable to everyone. To start, let’s review some accessibility basics.

• Why Accessibility Matters
• Accessible Design Principles

Use Ally

Ally is a tool in Canvas that offers two benefits:

• scans all uploaded course files and produces an accessibility score and instructions to make the file more accessible
• offers students the option to download alternate formats of files (e.g., mp3 from a PDF file). This option works well when files contain real text and are of good quality.

What is Ally?

Check PDFs in Course

• Accessible PDF Checklist
• Fixing Inaccessible PDFs
• Scanning Best Practices

PDFs from Library Databases

Is a PDF article also offered in HTML format? Top 3 databases that offer PDF, HTML or other formats for articles  - Consult a Librarian

• Academic Search Complete (General)
• CINAHL Complete (Nursing)
• CQ Researcher (General)
• Gale Virtual Reference Library (Audio format available)

Check Office Documents in Course

• Creating Accessible Word Documents
• Creating Accessible PowerPoint Slides

Check Images in Course

• Adding Alt Text to Canvas Images

Use text + images instead of text in images in content when possible. Types of images:

• Simple images - Their meaning in context
• Complex images (graphs, maps, etc.) - Meaning should be fully described in surrounding text and contain a short description in the alt text to identify it.
• Decorative - Only for visual appeal purposes

Canvas Pages

• Syllabus, Home & Content Pages
  Canvas Pages
• Hyperlinks
  Should be descriptive, with the URL behind the name to inform the user beforehand the link purpose - For example, use Wikipedia website (not Wikipedia: Click here or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page).
  When using Canvas pages, full URLs get printed if the page is printed to PDF or paper.
• Tables
  Accessible Tables in Canvas

Navigation

• What is the course Home page?
  How to Set a Home Page
• Hide unused tools
  How to Manage Navigation

Audio & Video

Is media captioned or a transcript available?

• Accessible Video & Audio
• Making Videos Accessible (9:35)
• Library Streaming Video Collections
  Consult a Librarian

Broken Links Check

This tool will provide a report of any broken links in the course. To access go to course Settings > Validate Links in Content.

• Canvas Link Validation Tutorial

Full Links to Resources on this Page

Need the URLs for all of these resources? Go go to the Canvas Accessibility Checklist Links page.