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Canvas

Canvas is the official learning management system of the UW. Canvas simplifies course management tasks: publishing course materials, grading, communicating with students, and more. For general information about Canvas, see the Canvas Learning Management System page on the UW Information Technology site.

Accessibility in Canvas

Canvas itself has been designed to be accessible to students and instructors with disabilities, and the platform is frequently updated with accessibility improvements. However, instructors are responsible for creating and uploading accessible content for their Canvas courses.

Best practices for creating accessible Canvas content

  • Headings: Create headings that are “coded as a heading,” which allows screen reader technology to announce headings for users who are listening to the content.
  • Alt text for images: Add alternative text (i.e., alt text) to images so readers using assistive technology will hear descriptions of images they do not see.
  • Color contrast: Use sufficient color contrast to ensure that text and icons are easy to read.
  • Links: Help users understand the destination of live links by writing meaningful link text instead of long alphanumeric URLs or vague phrases like “click here.”
  • Lists: Use built-in tools to create number or bullet lists.
  • Tables: Use built-in tools to identify column and row headers.
  • Captions on videos: Provide captions for videos shared via Canvas.

Canvas Accessibility Checkers

The UW provides multiple tools for checking accessibility within Canvas. These tools complement each other as they each provide you with a slightly different perspective on accessibility of your course materials. We encourage you to use them all to get a more complete picture.

Canvas Accessibility Checker

Canvas ships with its own built-in Accessibility Checker.  This is accessible from within the rich content editor when editing a Canvas page. It checks accessibility of the current Canvas page as you type. For additional details, see the Accessibility Checker in Canvas page.

Anthology Ally

The UW has licensed a tool from Anthology called Ally. Ally automatically checks course content and files uploaded by instructors and provides feedback to instructors about the accessibility of these materials. It does so in two ways.

Accessibility Score Icons

Throughout a Canvas course, wherever there are links to uploaded files, an icon is displayed for instructors indicating the accessibility level of that file (Low, Medium, High, or Perfect). The following screenshot shows these icons in an Accessibility column within the Files area of a course.

Files table in Canvas, with one row for each file uploaded to a course. The Accessibility column in the table includes an icon, a meter showing an approximate accessibility level for each file.

Clicking on any of these icons opens a help panel that provides feedback on each of the accessibility issues found within that file, and provides guidance on how to fix the problems.

Accessibility Report

For instructors within a course, Ally adds an item to the course navigation menu labeled “Ally Course Accessibility Report”. This report provides an overview of the course accessibility and assigns a score (from 0 to 100%). The report includes an itemized list of all course content including accessibility scores for each item. It also provides two recommended entry points for getting started: Fix the content with the easiest issues to fix, or Fix the lowest scoring content. The following screenshot shows the dashboard of an example Canvas course.

Ally Course Accessibility Report dashboard, showing a score of 77%, a donut chart showing the various types of course content, and two prompts to fix the content with the easiest issues or the lowest scoring content

Additional resources