Strategies for Prioritising Accessibility

Wonderful. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining the webinar today. We will take a couple of minutes for everyone to log in and find their way to us, but welcome. While we're waiting for everyone to arrive, I will launch a poll to get a better sense of who's here today. What's nice is in the chat or in the attendance list, I can see some familiar names.

So it's great to have you here. Welcome. But if you wouldn't mind filling in the poll just so I can get a better sense of who's here today while we're waiting for the session to get started. Wonderful. I can see we have a great mix of people who have joined in the session today, and the tech check seems to be working okay.

Everyone can hear me and see me okay. Let's just take another minute or so while we're waiting for others to join. And if you haven't already, you can find the poll and answer the questions that will just help me get a better sense of who is here today. Wonderful. Welcome everyone to the session.

We will go ahead and get started. If you have colleagues who are still joining, you expect them to be joining shortly, the session will remain open so they can absolutely join a few minutes late if they need to. And as with all of these sessions, the sessions will be recorded so you'll have access to the recording at the end of the session, as well as access to a takeaway resource where we've included, some resources and some key questions relating to the topics that we'll be discussing today. But for this session, I'd like to welcome everyone who's here. Thank you so much for taking time out of what is often a very busy time of year to join us for the next forty five minutes or so to take a moment to think about accessibility, inside of Canvas.

I'll be leading the session today. For those of you who haven't met yet, my name is Jessica Jones. I'm a learning consultant here on the services team and Instructure, and I'm joined also by my colleagues Emily and Sarah, who you may interact with if you place any questions in the chat and who are here to support the session as well. As we move through the session, if you have any questions, please do use the q and a function. That's the easiest way for you to ask questions.

We can answer them directly. We can share resources, and those q and a questions get nicely captured in the recording as well so we can share all of that with you after. We also have the chat. We are also welcome to say hello, to share enthusiasm or comments, with your fellow Canvas users. The chat is a great place to interact with each other, share ideas and thoughts as you have them, and the q and a is the best spot for raising any questions that you might like us to answer.

Thank you so much those of you who filled in that poll. We have a real mix of attendees here today, which is great. Everyone is welcome, including the one student. Someone here may be using Canvas as a teacher and studying at the same time or or just studying. It's wonderful to have you here.

We have a real mix of content creators, administrators, and technical support as well. So I really hope that there's something for everyone in this session, regardless of where the majority of your time is spent in Canvas. Accessibility is one of those topics that impacts us all. A bit like health and safety in the building, we've all got a responsibility to make sure that our students are able, to access our content safely and securely. Most of us are at least comfortable or more confident with the tools, and we're hoping to take away everything, all of those aspects.

I hope this webinar delivers towards that. The knowledge of tools mainly focuses on best practice for how to apply some of those tools, And, certainly, those of you who are involved in internal campus training, there should be some things that will help inform your planning of those as well. So thank you for filling in the poll. Please use the q and a to ask any questions as we move through. And wonderful to see in the chat, we're already sharing enthusiasm, whatever the weapon may be in our various regions.

I was just talking to some colleagues saying that I actually put the heating on today for the first time here in Wales. Summer seems already a distant memory. But nonetheless then, let's move on with the session. So in these sessions, we're really excited to welcome, members and individuals from many different organizations across the region. So we've got representation from lots of different countries across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and across all different types of organizations, higher ed, further ed, corporate training, many more as well.

So keep in mind as we move through the session that every instance is unique. If I show you something that looks different to your instance, it may be that there's a setting I have enabled that you haven't got enabled yet, or it may be that a policy has been decided in your organization to use a tool in a certain way, and so a workflow that I'm suggesting isn't relevant in your case. That's fine. Every instance is unique, so please keep your context in mind as we move through the session. Some things we discuss may be more relevant to you than others, and that's okay.

Just like how we teach and how we facilitate learning in our organization is most likely unique to everyone as well. If you see anything that I'm demonstrating that you don't see, just let us know in the q and a or in the chat, and we can, let you know how you can enable that if you'd like to use it. Secondly, the Instructure community is a wealth of knowledge. I'm sure, everyone in the poll that answered the poll said they've been using Canvas for some time now. So, hopefully, you've already found your way to the Canvas community.

If you haven't, it is truly a wealth of knowledge. There's lots of information on there on tools, best practices, content created by us and in structure, content created by people who use Canvas like yourselves. So there's lots of opportunities in there to dive into these topics in more detail if you're interested. And thirdly, if you have any institution specific questions, please feel comfortable after the session to raise those with your CSM. We'll be able to help guide you through any settings you might like to turn on, feature options you might like to enable, or follow-up with any questions you may have.

So with those being said, those general guidelines, what are we going to focus on today? We are looking at strategies for achieving accessibility, and accessibility is a huge and very important topic. So in this session, we're going to focus on three principles for how to approach this conversation and this topic at your organization. Now the conversation today, compliments a blog post that is already available in the community. Share a link to that with you. And if anyone came to CanvasCon in Amsterdam last year, we had a conversation on a similar topic then as well.

But we've been asked to cover this topic again, and that was a popular session at CanvasCon last year. So we're taking the time today to do so. And the hope is that you can take away at least a spark of an idea that can contribute to champion accessibility, raising the profile, and raising the accessibility of the learning provision that you provide in Canvas for your students. So the three principles that we are going to cover today begin with embedding accessibility early and continuously. So the idea that accessibility is an important topic that should be covered and addressed from the beginning and always when we're talking about learning and teaching.

The second principle we'll look at is investing time in RCE enablement. So the RCE refers to the rich content editor. That's the toolbar that we see almost everywhere in Canvas when we're creating content, and we should really invest time in ensuring that we understand and we're providing training on how to use that in a way that will ensure the content that is created is accessible. Those of you in the poll who said you're involved in Canvas training, that will surely be a good principle for you to tune in and and listen to on that point. The third principle that we're going to explore today is recognizing the value of consistency for the learner.

So often our learners are engaged in more than one Canvas course or more than one type of learning experience, and consistency can have a valuable role in that learning experience. So, each of these principles, we're going to take some time to look at today. They've each been informed by how, at Instructure, we approach various activities with organizations like yourself, that we work with. So this spans lots of activities related to Canvas, including Canvas adoption, kind of strategic level planning, training and enablement, at the teacher or content creation level, designing courses, designing content items. These principles span all of those activities.

So whatever your role is with Canvas at your organization, hopefully, there'll be some things to think about relating to these topics here. So let's start with that first one then, embed early and continuously. What we mean by that is that we should be discussing accessibility from the beginning and then arguably in as many conversations as we can about learning and certainly about creating learning content on the online platform. When we do this, we're conveying that accessibility is essential, It's foundational, and that everyone should be aware of the importance and how to make sure our content is accessible. What we sometimes see is that the conversation of accessibility gets, dismissed until later or gets identified as a lower priority.

The risk there when we save this conversation for later is that it's missed. We don't come back to it or that it's seen as optional, or maybe accessibility is seen as something that's more advanced or for a different team to be responsible for. So instead, we recommend acknowledging and addressing accessibility from the beginning and as often as we can moving forward. So that might include in all training sessions or enablement sessions, in communications. If we are building templates, have they been built to meet accessibility standards? If we are creating course checklists, is accessibility referenced on that checklist or the design requirement that we might be shared with people? However we're communicating about Canvas, is accessibility included early on? Now a really important element of that is addressing why accessibility is important.

Because like many things, if we can make it easy to connect on the why, or teachers, or content creators, or learning facilitators, then we're all more likely to embrace the how. So anyone who identified they operate at a strategic level and that they'd like from the session to think about some onward decision making, make sure you can clearly communicate in your organization why accessibility is important in your context. If we're aligned and able to clearly articulate the why our users are more likely to embrace the how and take on the practices that allow us to build the accessible content. So why is accessibility important? Now you may already in your organization be very clear on this. The reason why may be slightly different depending on your context.

Maybe you have local laws to consider, for example, or maybe your organization really prioritizes, access to certain types of students, and so your why for accessibility may take a different perspective. There are many reasons why accessibility is important, and we're just going to briefly talk about some of these reasons to help support those of you who may not yet be at a place in your organization where you are clearly communicating why accessibility is important. So some ideas here on the deck. Let's just briefly talk through those. Firstly, to provide the necessary foundation for learning to occur.

If students cannot access the content, they cannot participate, let alone succeed in the learning process. And often, we're really familiar with this in a physical space. We may have health and safety requirements. We know that we should have ramps alongside steps, for example, to make sure learners can access the building. We need to be thinking about those same accessibility issues in a physical space in the online space that we do in the physical.

Secondly, to be inclusive of all our students. Our students have huge differences in abilities and needs, whether that's cognitive, visual, auditory, motor, speech. There could be a whole range of difference in our students. And sometimes those differences are known. Sometimes those differences are unknown.

Sometimes those differences are permanent. Sometimes they're temporary. And I think this biologous situational, is something that we really noticed during the pandemic and seems to be, increasingly a consideration for us to take. That we don't always know the situation in which our learners are trying to engage with their learning. So we need to make our context as accessible as it can be so that whatever context our students are learning in, hopefully, they can access and engage with that context, with that learning content.

And the same goes for temporary. We may think we know our learners really well. We know the accessibility needs they have, but life happens and things change that impact, our abilities. And if we build our content in a way that is accessible from the beginning, that's already encountered for. We shouldn't need to be responsive with accessibility.

We should build it as inclusive from the beginning so that all students are able to access our content. And that goes for future proofing our content as well. I've skipped a bullet point here, but never mind. So, when we think about future proofing our content, our future students are currently unknown. So let's build our content in a way that is inclusive so that all students have the opportunity to engage, and we're not needing to do any work later on to retrospectively, adapt for individual students.

We also want to make sure that our content, can be accessed across devices. Increasingly, mobile access is a preference of our learners, smaller screen sizes from a mobile phone or from a tablet. If our content is built in a way that is accessible, it will respond to those screen sizes, and our learners can access their learning in their desired preference. On top of that, we need to think about assistive technology. We don't always know the devices that our learners are accessing Canvas from.

They may be using screen readers, screen magnifiers, speech command software. We want to make sure our content's built in a way that will interact reliably with all of those different devices. We mentioned we may have different accessibility requirements or laws that we may need to follow, whether they're set at your organization level, on a local level, or a national level. I know the European Accessibility Act is coming into effect in twenty twenty five, and that's gonna turn lots of these practices into law for many of us. So we want to make sure we're aligned with that.

And if that isn't enough for you or for some members of your organization, what's quite difficult to argue with is that accessibility, many of the practices we follow align with best practices in learning theory anyway. Many of the decisions we make to achieve accessibility also are supporting the goals of other learning theories or other pedagogical practices we are embodying. Whether that's linked to, cognitive load theory, social learning, universal design learning, connectivism, or something as simple as, chunking and cementing content into smaller sections. Yes. That satisfies accessibility, but it talks to pedagogical good practice as well.

So fundamentally, accessibility should underpin all of our course design considerations and how we build content in Canvas. And I'd encourage you at an organizational level to be able and to be communicating why accessibility is important when you're talking about Canvas to your users, particularly those who will be building content and facilitating learning in the system. Another way that we could embed early and continuously the conversation of accessibility, is simply by showing Canvas on different screen sizes. So in slide decks, are we including images of Canvas from a tablet or a mobile phone? In workshops, are we asking teachers to create content from the mobile app? These are ways that we can convey how Canvas looks differently across mobile devices and begin that conversation of why we need to build our content in a way that's accessible to be interpreted by different devices. Similarly, when we're planning enablement, whether that's training, workshops, communication documents, presentations.

Think about including a demonstration of Microsoft immersive reader. So this is a tool that is available for everyone. It's in Canvas as a feature option. If you'd like to enable it, you can. You can access it most places in Canvas where content is created via the rich content editor, and it is a tool for accessibility.

There's tools in there that allow you to, translate words or whole pages to adjust the size of text, to add background colors, to suggest images to aid understanding of words. It's a really excellent tool for all students to use if they want to make use of it. Now why might we show that in training? Well, firstly, it can raise the profile of assistive technology for teachers. We may never have heard a screen read reader or seen a screen magnifier, so it allows us to see what that looks like. Secondly, it allows us to check that our content has been built in a way that will be reliably interpreted by assistive technology.

So we can check, for example, that our tables have been formatted correctly, that we've added alt text, that we have used headings. We're talking about this course. Oh, this course is I'll be talking about one of those things in a moment as well. So just to recap again where I accessed that Microsoft immersive reader from inside a page, but we'll see this in other spots. We see the rich content editor.

We can access the immersive reader just here in the top right hand corner. Again, if you don't see this, you may need to enable the feature option or the setting in your instance, but this is where all of our learners and teachers can access the tool if they would like to. The final, strategy I'm going to share for aligning with embed in early and continuously is consider having ways to share good practice on accessibility. Often, we see organizations plan training and workshops and live sessions. But we could make use of tools in Canvas to also have takeaway resources that demonstrate good practice.

And using Canvas Commons can be an excellent example of this. In Canvas Commons, we could add an example of a Canvas page that has been built to meet accessibility requirements. Our teachers could then take a look at this content in their sandbox course. They could use the Microsoft immersive reader on this content and really begin to understand how we build accessible content. When we're in a live training session, maybe you'll find this today as well, there's lots of information to take away.

So we can use Canvas Commons as an option to provide, a takeaway resource that teachers, content creators can then import into their sandboxes to really explore and better understand how accessible content can be built in Canvas. Another approach we could use Canvas Commons for then is that once we have this content in our sandbox, we could choose to use that as a template so that I'm duplicating and copying pages that have been built accessibly, and I'm just adding the content that I need to add when it's my turn to build out that content. So that's our first strategy. It's great to see there's some questions coming into the chat. We'll pick up on those towards the end of the session as well.

But for now, I'm going to move on to the second principle, which is investing time in RCE enablement. So Canvas has a consistent tool for creating content. And if I return to Canvas, and I'll just navigate to a page, when we say the RCE, we mean the rich content editor, which is this toolbar and combination of tools that we see in many places when we're creating content in Canvas. This might be in a page, assignment, discussion, quiz, anywhere we're creating content in Canvas. And it does look familiar to other toolbars.

So maybe we're familiar with Word, where we know how to make titles or bullet points or add content. So often, we are assuming that we don't need to spend too much time on training this tool because this is something that our colleagues may already know how to use effectively, and we can instead prioritize time on other tools that may need a bit more attention. However, this is a toolbar that's designed for making web pages. That's very different to something like Word where we may be creating printed documents. So it's really worthwhile investing time in self enablement and enablement of our colleagues who are using the rich content editor to ensure they know how to create content correctly in a way that will be reliably and effectively, interpreted by other devices.

For example, adjusting to different screen sizes or in a way that can be interpreted by assistive technology. So if our students are accessing Canvas using technology to support their learning, that technology is reliably getting the content that we've spent a lot of time creating. And it might seem like another task to do, another task to train on, investing time in the rich content editor, but it really is worthwhile. There's a good return on that time investment for a few reasons. One, good practice is simple and I'm going to show some examples in a moment.

It's often just clicking a slightly different button to what we might have clicked or taking a slightly different workflow to how we might have built things in Word. So we're not asking people to do extra things often, just change their practice. Also, the rich content editor is everywhere in Canvas. So if we learn how to use it correctly, our content across pages, assignments, quizzes, announcements, all of those wonderful Canvas tools we want to use. We know the content that's going to be built there will then be built in a way that's accessible, or we've at least enabled others to use it in a way that builds accessible content.

And thirdly, when we introduce it as how to use the tool right from the beginning, it just becomes part of our go to practice. It's not seen as something additional to learn later on. It just becomes the way that we use Canvas. And it could be that accessibility is already a topic that's discussed or there's already resources at the organization, but because we're bringing in Canvas, this is another opportunity to raise the profile of why these things are important. So, hopefully, I've managed to persuade or align you that this is a worthwhile use of time.

What should we cover in the rich content editor? Well, I'm going to show you five elements that I think are really key. Organizations sometimes have other things they wish to add or see other things as preferences. We have another fantastic blog in the community that looks at seven principles that I'll share with you as well. But for today, I've got five. The first one of those is that we should be using headings to communicate structure.

So sometimes we may have a practice of selecting text, changing that to a particular size. Size eighteen, size twenty four, just a larger font size. And if I'm printing, that works fine. But in an online context, I want to tell Canvas this is a heading. In case you didn't catch that on the the the video that's playing just there, I'm gonna take the time just to show in Canvas where this may be.

So this is where I have a heading. I tell Canvas that this is a heading. Heading two is the largest size, heading four is the smallest. Now this is important because when I do that, it captures into the code that that is a heading. So if I'm moving to a smaller moving to a smaller screen size, Canvas will show that text in a size that's appropriate for that screen size.

If I'm using keyboard shortcuts to navigate through the page, I can easily jump between the different headings and the different sections of content. If I'm using assistive technology, a screen reader, for example, might read those as headings so the learner can track where they are on the page. And, again, this links to our good practice, in learning theory often anyway of segmenting content into smaller sections to align with how our brain, processes and stores information. So that's our first idea. Use headings to communicate structure, avoid telling Canvas the size of the heading, and instead tell Canvas that it's a heading so that all of those devices or no matter how the learner is navigating the page, they can easily navigate between those different sections.

The second item is really similar in that if we're using, bullet points or we're trying to create a list, tell Canvas their bullet points. What I mean by that, and myself, I'm absolutely guilty of this sometimes, is when I'm coming to make a list, I may have an icon that I like to use, an asterisk, for example, a list item one, and so forth. Canvas does try and recognize if it's a list. So if I do numbers, for example no. Not today.

But sometimes Canvas recognizes this is a list. Best practice, what I should be doing if ever I want to bullet or number items, we just tell Canvas that this is a list. That could be a bullet. That could be by numbers. However, I would prefer to set up that content.

Now the reason that I should do this is, again, in the code, Canvas will capture that this is a list. So if I move into a smaller screen size that indents display correctly, if I'm using assistive technology, the end user knows this is a list. And rather than reading it as a paragraph, it will read it as a list. As I said earlier, it's not really adding any extra work, but taking the time to explain why and show how to use the bullet points, hopefully, will reinforce them the tendency to use that behavior. Number three of the five is that we should use bold to add emphasis.

We may have a preference or a habit to underline, but in an online context, we expect underline to be clickable. In fact, there are tools in Canvas that allow all clickable elements to be underlined. And if your learner has that enabled, they may expect something that's underlined to be clickable. So we don't really want to use underline for emphasis. Similarly, we may have a practice of using capital letters for emphasis, that kind of shouty, visual display.

But a screen reader may read that as an acronym. And for all of our brains, research shows that that slows having capital letters for words, slows reading speed for many of us. So if we would like text to have emphasis, the recommendation is that we bold that text instead of capitalize or underline. Again, we're not really adding any work here. We're just replacing an old workflow where we may have used a color choice, capital or underline, and instead, when we're creating web pages, use bold to add the emphasis.

The fourth consideration for us with the rich content editor that we want to include in our training is adding alt tags to describe images. Now the idea with an alt tag is that not all of our learners will be accessing the image visually. For example, we may have a visual impairment. We may have a firewall on our Internet connection. We may have low bandwidth because we're in a remote place of the world or we don't have any data left on our mobile device.

And in those cases where the learner is not accessing the content visually, they may instead be adding accessing the alt text. And this is text that we can add to all images. Best practice is that this is concise and it conveys any intended meaning from the image. So if I had an image of, two students on a laptop, the text would say two students on a laptop. If it's a more detailed description like a graph or a complex image, I may even want to write a more detailed description and add that as a file or place that as text underneath the image because the alt text, we really want it to be concise.

So how do I add alt text to, Canvas? Well, anytime that I add an image, Canvas will ask me for the alt text. If I want to go back and check an image has alt text, I can click on the image, select image options, and here I can see I have a spot to add the alt text. So this could be a bookshelf of twenty two different colored books. Now if I want all learners to understand this image, I will use the alt text for a concise image. However, as is the case here, it may be an image that's purely there for design purposes.

In which case, I can select that this is a decorative image. And for any users not accessing the page visually, this item will be removed from the page for them. So if there is a decorative image, banner, an icon, a page divider, I can select that as decorative. Otherwise, I should place some alt text in there so that any learners who are not accessing the page visually can still gain the intended meaning from the image. The final strategy when we're talking about investing time in the rich content editor is explaining how to correctly include links.

And the recommendation here is that links convey the end destination. So best example is what I have here. I want to share the Canvas guide, so I type the step by step instructions, explore the Canvas guide. And I select the word Canvas guide, and I turn that into a hyperlink. I add the link just there.

Now why is this best practice? Well, the user understands where they will be taken if they click on the link, so it's safe. For Cognition, I'm more likely to remember the destination link that I'm being sent to. So in future, if I have a similar issue or I'm doing a similar problem or similar task, I'm more likely to remember, ah, there's a resource that might help me with that, far more likely than if I were to see this URL. And then also for any assistive technology as well. Maybe I'm using, a screen reader that's reading out the page.

I really don't want to waste my time listening to h t t p s dot slash slash community dot canvas l m s dot com. It's just a waste of time, and I'm not gonna remember that. It's going to be much better for me if I hear, explore the canvas guide. Also, all of us, if we prefer to use keyboard shortcuts to navigate through the page, there is the ability to quickly navigate between the different links that are provided in a Canvas page. So we want to avoid if we can click here.

If I'm navigating, ten links on a page and as I do, they all say click here, click here, click here, Click here. I really do not know what here refers to. Whereas, if that link is conveying the destination, I'm able to make a more informed decision about which link I'm looking for and whether I want to go to that link. So likely, many of us are familiar with this practice anyway. But in our training, we can explain why that's important to encourage others to follow that practice.

And in case anyone hasn't seen it before, how we add the hyperlink is we select the text or the image we would like to use as the hyperlink, and we insert a link to an external website. And here, we can place that link to the website. So there are lots of other things that we can consider, but those are the foundational five elements that we recommend everyone includes in their Canvas training to raise the profile of why and how we can build content in Canvas that is accessible. The final point to say on the rich content editor is that we do have a tool in the rich content editor called the accessibility checker. It's just here.

It's designed to function a bit like a spell check, in that a spell check doesn't teach us how to spell. It helps us pick up any mistakes that we may have missed. The same for the accessibility checker. It's not designed to cover all aspects of accessibility for us. We still need to understand how to build accessible content, but it will check if there's things we've missed and it will help us correct those just like a spell checker.

So it's great practice when we're training on the rich content editor to highlight this so we can just build it into practice. But before we select save in Canvas, we always take a look at the accessibility checker. And if there are any considerations, the great thing about this tool is that it allows us to correct them and that applies for many of the different, things that it spots in there. But, also, it tells us why this is an accessibility consideration. So it's trying to help us, develop our understanding of accessibility processes as well.

Now we only have forty five minutes or so together today, so by no means this covers everything on how to build accessible content. There are some other things that we can explore, and I talked to some of these in that takeaway resource that we'll share at the end of the session along with the recording. There's some more information if you'd like to look into more of these topics. But the final strategy for us today was recognize the value of consistency. Now one thing we often love about Canvas is that it is a flexible tool.

And that's great because it allows us to, use Canvas in all these different teaching contexts. It allows our teachers to really use the preference and tools that work for them. However, we do need to be careful and consider that flexibility when it comes to the individual student experience. The feedback we often get from students when Canvas has been in an organization for a long time that hasn't taken the time to think about this, to think about consistency for the students, the feedback we often get is that Canvas is confusing because all the courses students move through are used differently. Different teachers, different subjects, different departments are doing things differently.

And when one student is experiencing a big volume of difference, it can really detract from the learning experience. So our role then, if we're involved with, strategic planning, with enablement, with good practice, we want to be having that conversation of consistency, raising the profile of the student experience when we're having the conversation of, consistency versus autonomy for teachers. And there's no right way to have that balance of consistency versus flexibility for the subject or the teacher at hand. There's no one right way to do it, but we definitely want the student experience and the value of consistency for that student to be considered. And the high level for that is we want it to be really easy for students to navigate through their course, to know where to find content, and be able to find that content so that they can prioritize their cognition and their time on the learning itself rather than finding it.

In a really similar way to if we were to walk into a building, we'd hope there's some kind of map or floor plan that makes it easy for us to find places. I guess it's a similar idea. So how can we have this element of consistency for our students? Firstly, it doesn't mean that everything needs to look exactly the same. There is still room to adapt to the subject or the teacher preference. Or maybe in bigger organizations, we won't have students in multiple departments, and we just need consistency at a more local level.

But the course design does need to be intentional, and we want to begin where we can from a place of consistency so that when we deviate, that's intentional, and there's a, a reason for that. Lots of different ways for how we could approach consistency and what might be consistent, and those are really gonna depend on your organization. So we may be choosing to have a template. We might be using a template or a blueprint tool in Canvas. We may choose to make use of commons to show examples of content and expect that content be built in a similar way.

We may have a course design checklist that's built by a teaching and learning team or collaboratively across faculty and students. There are ways of how we can disseminate consistency. We should also think about what we want to be consistent. And that may be the homepage of a course. So here we have just a few examples.

There's some more in the resource that we'll share on how we could achieve consistency on home pages. Maybe we always have the same number of links or we have the same types of buttons, or a similar visual image. We can also think about consistency in module structures so that our modules overall are structured in a similar way, whether that's, by weeks, by topics, by units, but also then within the module itself. Perhaps we're going to have, repetitive titles, and this refers to throughout the course as well as from course to course. Maybe every module this example has overview, activities, review.

We have another example here. Every module includes learn, collaborate, and assess. This is an option we can support consistency all with the experience with the intention of making the student experience easy to navigate. The final one I've got here on the slide deck is, again, something that, doesn't always get thought about, and this is consistency in page layout. If we're going to be using discussions, could we develop a template for discussions? This example has a prompt, guidelines, support.

If we know we're going to be providing lots of pages that have videos like a lecture, Could we design a simple template page that we duplicate and just fill in each time so that those individual content items, are also consistent for learners and they know what to expect when they go there? So there's lots of different ways that we can achieve consistency. The level of consistency and what should be consistent, what's right in those aspects is going to absolutely depend on your context, but it's a very, very valuable conversation to have. So before we take some time to pause and address any other questions that people may have, and please, if you, have questions, please place them in the q and a. If you have thoughts, absolutely, please share them in the chat. We often find we learn more from each other than from the facilitator in these sessions, but I just wanted to bring together all of those ideas.

We've looked at three strategies for achieving accessibility or raising the profile of accessibility and some key questions here that we should be thinking about in our organization if we if we haven't had the opportunity yet. Firstly, why is accessibility important in their organization, and how will we communicate this? Secondly, how will we ensure the rich content editor is being used appropriately? And that may be including time and training. And then finally, how will we advocate for consistency? What does consistency look like in your context, and how will you ensure that's achieved? So perhaps those are some conversations that we'll go on to have in our organization. I appreciate that accessibility is a very big topic. We're just scratching the surface today, but I hope that was helpful to take some time to think about accessibility and how we could prioritize how we talk about that and how we achieve that in our organizations.

I'm gonna pause there. I'm gonna take a moment to catch up with the q and a. You can see Emily's been busy. Thank you so much for answering those questions. If anyone else has any other questions, please do feel free to share.

Otherwise, we'll be sharing a recording and that takeaway resource, following the webinar today. Yeah. Great. I'm just catching up with the question. So the, question on any articles that link accessibility to other learning theories, that takeaway resource that we have, there are some other ones in there as well.

So that might be helpful for you to take a look at. And, Emily, thank you for sharing those suggestions there. Oh, you're welcome. Wonderful. Well, in that case, it seems like we've answered all the questions in the chat.

Thank you so much for your time today. I hope that was helpful session to take a few moments to talk about accessibility. We'll follow-up with the recording and that takeaway resource for you. And, hopefully, I'll see some of you in CanvasCon, taking place in just a few weeks' time where no doubt at least some of us will be talking about accessibility again. But thank you everyone so much for joining today. I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. Oh, you're very welcome.