Canvas: Tips for Getting Started

You can make your courses more accessible today. Even a little progress is progress and can make a difference for your students.

These four tips will help you get started.

Tip 1: Learn accessibility strategies

Knowing the accessibility strategies means you can create accessible content from the beginning. Check out How to create accessible Canvas courses to learn eight accessibility strategies you can start using today.

Tip 2: Learn more about the Web Accessibility Guide and Accessibility Dashboards

The Web Accessibility Guide finds and helps you fix accessibility issues. Use it to remediate entire courses or for quick checks whenever you update content.

Learn how to use it with these resources:

The Accessibility Dashboards give an overview of all your courses and each individual course. Learn how to use your dashboards with these resources:

Tip 3: Getting your course accessible

If you have existing courses that are inaccessible, try setting aside dedicated time to tackle accessibility issues. This could be at the same time you update the course for a new term.

You can tackle all of the same issues at once or go by page. With the course dashboard, you can drill down by issue type or page and then go from the dashboard straight to the Accessibility Guide to fix the issue.

Watch the video below to learn how to drill down by issue type or page:

Tip 4: Keeping your course accessible

If you’re starting a new course, use the eight accessibilty strategies from How to create accessible Canvas courses:

Alternative text
Headings
Tables
Links
Contrast
Documents
Videos
Text writing and formatting

If you create content with these strategies, you wont have to go back and fix issues later.

Quickly review pages with the Accessibility Guide whenever you update them. This is a quick way to make sure issues are fixed before they’re problems for your students.