Activity: Try This!

Many students are using the Canvas mobile app to view online courses. Have you checked your content on the mobile app to make sure your content is mobile-friendly? Take your course on a mobile test drive!

Go to your app store and download the Canvas app
Check to see that all of your course content is accessible and mobile-friendly

Various state and federal laws have requirements aimed at making education accessible to as many people as possible. For instance, making sure that classrooms are wheelchair accessible would be an effort to comply with these laws and policies. Online classes need to be accessible as well! Here are some best practices to use in Canvas.

For most people, they work to build an accessible course using the principles below. However, if you need to adapt current content or are looking for more details on how to make your course accessible. Check out the Universal Design self-paced course developed by CU Online. You will also have a chance to explore this course in another module.

Design

Keep the design simple, clean, and uncluttered.
Use alternate text tags for images. For example, you can add alternate text when you embed an image from the web or from Flickr creative commons. If you have an image in your course file you want to use, you can add an alt tag by switching to HTML view. Doing this will mean that people who use a screen reader to read aloud the contents of a web page will hear an auditory description of the image.
Rather than pasting in raw URLs, link to words that describe the link destination. Again, this will help people using a screen reader understand where the link will take them.
Use other formatting besides color (bold words, different size font) to distinguish between important items in your course. Changing the font size rather than using different colors will benefit those people who cannot differentiate colors.
Learn to use CTRL+ and CTRL- or CMD+ and CMD- to resize the text in the course for the visually impaired.

Video

Caption YouTube Videos.
Use the link icon in the Rich Content Editor to embed a YouTube video. It will auto-embed the video and link to the title of the video. Visit How do I link to a YouTube Video? in the Canvas Guides for more information.

Screen Reader Programs

Macintosh: VoiceOver (the latest version for Safari)
PC: JAWS (latest version for Internet Explorer 9 &10 and Firefox)
There is no screen reader support for Canvas in Chrome

Resources

Tips & Tricks

By pressing the comma key, a pop-up window with keyboard shortcuts will appear for keyboard navigation on the following pages in Canvas:

Content from: Improving the Accessibility of Your Course Canvas Guide