Course Accessibility Guidelines and Tutorials

Accessibility Report

Ally is a tool that's been added to Canvas to give faculty the means to check the accessibility of their course materials using the Accessibility Report tool. To run a report:

With your course open in Canvas, click the Accessibility Report link on the navigation menu.

The report will generate within a few seconds and return the overall accessibility score for that course. Below is an example:

In this video, Christina runs an Accessibility Report for her class and discusses next steps.

Getting to Green - or Greener!

To improve the overall accessibility score for your course, start by fixing the low scoring items. How you fix an item will depend on the type of file - we've provided help for each type of file. 

1. Click the Start button in the Fix low scoring content box.

2. Look at the file extension for each item and refer to corresponding help page on this web site:

Common Issues and their Fixes

The best fix is to avoid getting issues at all, so take a look at the guidelines for images, videos, and documents that are posted on this site as you update or create course material.

These are common issues that appear on the Accessibility Report in Canvas:

Issue: The image does not have a description

Issue: The document does not have headings

Issue: The document is scanned but not OCRed

Issue: The document contains images without a description

Of course, any time you have an issue reported and aren't sure how to fix it, reach out to an instructional designer and they'll help you through it.