Simplify Canvas Course Accessibility

As a Canvas Admin or a course Instructor, you know Canvas courses can be critical to a student’s success. But, if a course is inaccessible, it can be difficult for students with disabilities to navigate or learn from. 

So, how can we simplify Canvas accessibility, so content creators, course editors, and admins can start making more accessible courses (especially, when time is limited, accessibility requires training, and data needs to be collected at the course, instructor, and institutional levels)?

That’s where Pope Tech comes in - our Canvas Accessibility Package includes our newly released Canvas Accessibility Dashboards and our Accessibility Guide.

In this post, we’ll briefly introduce you to Pope Tech and how it simplifies Canvas accessibility.

Rather watch the video? Check out the Pope Tech Canvas Dashboard and Accessibility Guide video.

Canvas Accessibility Dashboards

Pope Tech’s Canvas Accessibility Dashboards give everyone access to unique data based on their role. That means admins and instructors can answer questions like:

• How inaccessible are my courses? 
• Where should I focus?
• How am I progressing?

Let’s take a peek at both the admin and instructor dashboards.

Admin dashboards

Canvas admins have data for the entire Canvas instance. They can review results per course, most common issues, content types like PDFs that should be reviewed, a list of courses, and issues over time.

Instructor dashboards

Instructors have dashboards for each course as well as a summary dashboard for all their courses. These bird-eye views help instructors quickly see there are issues, drill down into them, and then fix them by taking them straight to the Accessibility Guide.

Data is important but doesn’t fix issues. Besides being data dashboards, Pope Tech provides tools, training, and resources to fix identified issues through our easy-to-use Accessibility Guide.

The Accessibility Guide

After drilling into the data, instructors and admins can use the Accessibility Guide to quickly fix issues. The Accessibility Guide is designed to do two things:

1. Quickly help people fix accessibility issues.
2. Train people on accessibility while they use it.

Quickly fix accessibility issues

Because the Accessibility Guide is just that, a guide, an instructor doesn’t need to take time to learn the tool or accessibility. They just give the Guide what it asks for, and it’ll fix the issue for them from there. 

For example, for a low contrast error, an instructor just slides the color scales to change the color and then clicks Apply - the error can be fixed in seconds. 

This is just one example of the many accessibility issues the Accessibility Guide helps instructors easily identify and fix. 

Besides just helping fix issues, the Accessibility Guide provides relevant accessibility training. 

One of the biggest feedback points received over the past 2 years from campuses and schools that use the Accessibility Guide is how it has helped scale accessibility Training.

Train people on accessibility

Pope Tech’s Accessibility Guide simplifies training by teaching while people are fixing issues. There are three parts to the Accessibility Guide that help people learn:

1. Action blurbs - One sentence explaining exactly how to fix the issue.
2. Documentation - Every result has documentation that details what the result means, why it matters, and how to fix it.
3. Examples - Shows how the issue could be fixed in different situations.

With the Accessibility Guide, everyone can start learning while they quickly make their courses more accessible.

Learn how to simplify accessibility with Pope Tech

In this brief introduction, we learned that Pope Tech’s Canvas Dashboards give everyone unique data. Admins and instructors can then take action with the easy-to-use Accessibility Guide to create accessible course content and fix detectable errors. 

Pope simplifies Canvas course accessibility.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Pope Tech can help your school, visit us on July 14th at the Pope Tech 2022 InstructureCon booth or visit pope.tech/lms.