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Teaching Resources

Creating an Accessible Canvas Course

Pope Tech's tools help ensure all learners can interact fully with your Canvas materials and activities.

In this article:

What is Pope Tech for Canvas?

Pope Tech for Canvas analyzes course content native to Canvas (i.e. not linked content, files or external tools, etc.).

Two separate tools are available:

  • The Pope Tech Accessibility Guide, which instructors can use inside the rich text editor, and
  • Pope Tech’s Accessibility Dashboards which can scan a whole course and provide an overview of risks and tasks to complete.

While using Pope Tech doesn’t guarantee complete accessibility, it offers a powerful tool for ensuring accessibility at the point of creation, as well as improving course materials that already exist. Pope Tech helps you learn, troubleshoot, and make progress toward creating a more inclusive learning environment.

Pope Tech for Canvas is just one helpful tool for providing accessible course materials. Use it in combination with other tools and resources (see our Digital Accessibility Guide).

How to use Pope Tech for Canvas

Know your accessiblity basics

A basic understanding of digital accessibility principles will make Pope Tech’s tools much more meaningful and easier to use.

Use Pope Tech’s Accessibility Guide when creating or editing content.

When you are in Canvas’s Rich Content Editor, open Pope Tech’s Accessibility Guide by clicking the Pope Tech icon right next to the “Cancel” and “Save” button at the bottom right of the page.

Key things to remember:

  • Anything marked as an “Error” (red icon with an “x”) must be fixed for your content to be accessible.
  • Anything marked as an “Alert” (yellow icon with a triangle) must be checked. Do not confuse an alert to mean that an item is less important than an error. Some things marked as alerts may be just as serious of an error; the tool just is not sure without a manual check.
  • Anything marked with a green square is an accessibility feature. It’s a good idea to review all features to be sure that they have been applied correctly.
  • Use question marks icons within the guide to learn more about each result.

Use Pope Tech’s instructor dashboards to check status of your courses.

To access Pope Tech’s Accessibility Dashboard, click on “Pope Tech Accessibility” in the Course Navigation Menu. Pope Tech offers a course-level dashboard as well as a dashboard where you can see all the courses for which you are an instructor. These dashboards can be used for courses imported from Moodle as well as those created in Canvas. The dashboards provide a valuable additional check to the in-editor accessibility guide.

Learn more:

  • Overview of Pope Tech for Canvas (DELTA Knowledge Base Article; coming soon!)

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