Check Your Course’s Accessibility From the Canvas Course Menu
FSCJ has been selected to participate in a Canvas Early Adopter Program to explore and provide feedback on a new feature that provides an easy way to identify and fix accessibility issues at the course level in Canvas. This feature will continue to be developed by Canvas to assist users in making course content accessible, in part because of the new Department of Justice rule that will be in place this April. We hope the feature is easy to use and is found to be beneficial in remediation efforts.
The Course Accessibility Checker
Most Canvas users are aware of the Canvas Accessibility Checker that can be accessed any time a user is editing content within the Rich Content Editor (RCE) area of Canvas. However, there is now an option to scan, review, and fix accessibility issues at the course level.
Visible only to instructors in the course and accessed from the course menu, the Accessibility link will first present an option to Scan Course. You may find the Accessibility link at the bottom of your course menu, above Settings. This initial scan goes through course content (only Pages and RCE-based Assignments at this point) and scans for the most common accessibility issues.
Once the scan is complete, the feature provides a course dashboard that lists any accessibility issues in the course by type, filtering options, where the issues exists, and a Fix button to review and remediate the issue.
The Fix button will open a side bar window that will allow you to cycle through each issue along with an explanation of the issue and the option to allow the feature to fix the issue. Next to each identified issue you will find a link to Open Page or Edit Page as well. This will be helpful when you may need to review the context of the page to determine if the suggested fix is appropriate.
Once each issue is reviewed and remediated, you will see confirmation (and balloons!) that the issues on that page or section have been resolved.
We Need Faculty Feedback
As part of the Early Adopter Program, we have been asked to invite our users to share their thoughts on the feature and its current functionality. All faculty and staff who author and edit Canvas content are encouraged to use the feature and provide feedback via this Feedback Survey before January 15. The information gathered will be used to further develop the tool and prioritize competing next enhancements and versions that get rolled out.
What the Future May Hold
Since this is an early adopter version of the tool, we can expect improvements, expansion, and potential AI enhancements down the road. However, in its current state the tool does not store any data scanned and no AI is used to suggest or remediate content. There is no expectation of cost associated with the tool in the future, with the exception of AI features that could roll into the tool and possibly have an associated cost. Another addition that has been discussed is a sub-account or full administrative dashboard where our EdTech team could have a big-picture view on full accessibility and where we may need to focus on improvements. As with any tool that is piloted or available only as an early adopter program, there will be many more details shared as it evolves.
