Accessibility Review Tips

Reviewers: Find Other Accessibility Tips Here!

If your team reviews Section D, Accessibility, you should be aware of your college’s unique process for reviewing this rubric section. Here are some recommendations for your team: 

• Check each Canvas page for accessibility, paying attention to:
  • Heading styles
  • Alt text
  • Lists
  • Descriptive links
  • Table headers
  • Color (both contrast and meaning)
  • Captions/transcripts
    • Ensure that all videos have appropriate captioning, including capitalization and punctuation 
• Use a combination of accessibility checkers such as:
  • Canvas Accessibility Checker
  • WAVE
• Use college-specific accessibility checkers such as:
  • Pope Tech
  • UDOIT
  • Ally

Accessibility Tools

Pope Tech is an accessibility checker made available by the CCC Accessibility Center, at no cost to all California Community Colleges.

• Request installation of Pope Tech on your campus for free!

UDOIT - open source (free) OR cloud-based (premium) 

The free open-source version of UDOIT requires hosting on a server. That could be somewhere on your college server, or, if that’s not possible, Heroku is a free cloud server option. There is also a cloud-based version of UDOIT which is hosted, but requires purchase (some colleges have done so). 

• Installation directions for UDOIT
• Installing Heroku

Ally (Blackboard) - Assists in making digital course content more accessible with alternative formats for students. It is available for purchase through the CCC STAC program.

CCC Document Converter (CCC Accessibility Center) - The CCC Document Converter is a free tool for California Community College alternate media specialists and staff to help convert digital files into alternate formats.

WebAim's Accessibility Color Contrast Checker

WAVE Tool

• The WAVE Tool in Action (Video)
• Installing the Wave Tool

Canvas Accessibility Checker Tool

Canvas and Your Accessibility Toolbox: (6/4/21) This webinar introduces the pros and cons of each tool

WAVE Accessibility Tool

The WAVE is a free tool helps authors make their web content accessible to individuals with disabilities. WAVE can identify many accessibility and Web Content Accessibility Guidance (WCAG) errors. 

This video provides a high-level orientation of the WAVE tool.

Tips for using the WAVE browser extension 

Canvas

1. WAVE the Home page
2. WAVE the syllabus page
3. WAVE the Orientation/Getting Started module

NOTE: If you find more than 4-5 issues in the areas above, skip to Step 5, and have the instructor WAVE the entire course page by page.
If the content in Steps 1-3 is clean (meaning you found fewer than 4-5 issues in total throughout),

4. Check 2-3 content modules and if everything is good, then the Canvas content is probably good
5. [We usually split the course in half and have the instructor WAVE half and the assigned ID will WAVE half (just so the instructor feels supported).] The instructor will probably need training on how to use the WAVE tool correctly and possibly even how to format using the Canvas Rich Content Editor.

Files

6. In Files, download at least three examples each of all file types in use (Word, PDF, PPT, Excel).
   1. Microsoft Office Suite: run built-in accessibility checker
   2. Adobe Acrobat: use “Make Accessible” tool and then run the accessibility checker

UDOIT Tips

It is recommended that faculty run one item at a time so the report is more manageable. You may then address each issue or item in each section. Be aware you may get “false positive” reports, such as indicating that captions are present (auto-generated), however they don’t include punctuation and capitalization. So actually, instead of referring to the report having errors, think of it as a list of issues to check.

UDOIT checks for :

• Use of headings in the page structure

• Alternative text for images

• Table headers

• Color contrast

• Video captions - typical false positive

Sections of the Course to Check

• Announcements
• Assignments
• Discussions
• Files (i.e., .html files)
• Pages
• Syllabus
• Module URLs

One example of how to approach using UDOIT:

1. Start with Announcements. After running the check, go through each issue to fix it.
2. You can do the remaining sections in any order. For example, first run the Syllabus, Module URLs, Discussions.
3. Leave Pages, Files, and Assignments for last because they’re usually so big to manage (but the process of fixing things is the same).