Pope Tech: Accessibility Guide

What Pope Tech Does 

Pope Tech is an advanced accessibility guide and checker located within the Rich Content Editor of Canvas. It is called the "Accessibility Guide" because it guides you through correctly formatting and fixing accessibility issues within your Canvas course. This integrated technology scans the page and provides a side panel listing errors and alerts it discovers, as well as providing feedback on where the errors are and guidance on how to fix them. 

The Accessibility Guide can be activated from the following areas of Canvas:

• Pages
• Assignments
• Discussions
• Syllabus
• Quizzes
• Announcements

How to Activate and Scan

When you are in the Edit mode of the Rich Content Editor, the activation button for the Accessibility Guide is located at the bottom of the window as a "P" icon next to the Cancel and Save buttons.

How it Works

Once activated, a side panel pops out that is divided into five sections:

• Images and Links
• Text and Contrast
• Headings
• Tables and Lists
• Documents

Within each category are results of errors and alerts found. These results are interactive; when selected, they display an image of the content and take you to the location on the Canvas page. Each result provides a link to additional documentation, examples on how to fix the issues, and the ability to correct the issue within the guide panel. 

Errors are results that need to be fixed. These issues are a priority to make content accessible to students with disabilities.

Alerts are the results that are highly suspicious and should be reviewed for accessibility errors.

 

Rescanning and Closing the Accessibility Guide

Once you go through each of the categories and make the changes and corrections, click the Rescan button at the top of the panel to ensure that everything in the Rich Content Editor is accessible. Then close the panel by clicking on the X button.

Tutorials

Click to access a self-paced textual tutorial.

What Pope Tech Doesn't Check

Like most tools, the Pope Tech Instructors Accessibility Guide has its limitations. It does not evaluate external instructional content  (Word documents, PDF's, PowerPoints, website resources, and embedded videos). But it will bring them to your attention and advise you to make sure the external content is properly formatted for accessibility. For support on these types of content, see the resources available to you on LPC's Web Accessibility page.

Pope Tech will also alert you about embedded YouTube videos. It will only advise you to make sure the video is well captioned.