Canvas Accessibility

I have been working over the summer on adapting the Language Resource Center’s “Showcase of Language, Culture and Literature Teaching”. This Canvas site has been created through collaboration between the LRC and professors who provided examples directly from their classes. The purpose of this online showcase is to be a guide to all instructors interested in increasing their knowledge on adapting a course to an online format. In the current academic environment, it is more important than ever that instructors understand how to incorporate an engaging, concise, and informational online source of course materials. 

As a student resource, the LRC is committed to providing materials that are not only diverse; but, more importantly, accessible to all students. My role with the LRC showcase website was to incorporate robust features to make the website easily digestible to people relying on screen readers and other equipment. Online accessibility is quickly becoming the rule and not the exception in academic and countless other spheres. Recent regulations have been implemented on web accessibility by State and Local Governments. “On April 24, 2024, the Federal Register published the Department of Justice’s final rule updating its regulations for Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act” (ADA.gov). This updated the legal requirements of websites to ensure all content is accessible to people with disabilities. Based on this update, the technical standard for all web content must follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines document”. This contains rules such as having captions listed on all videos or audio files, including alternative text for images, and more. 

My job for this project was to make sure each page in the canvas site had accessibility features. For each Canvas page, I edited the text to make sure all important information was categorized as a heading to facilitate ease of skimming through content for screen readers. After fixing headings, I edited images to add alternative text, changed the text of links to make them seamlessly incorporated into each paragraph, and organized the general flow of each page. Further into my project, I learned more complex ways to manage accessibility. 

The end product of the LRC showcase page is a website geared towards online equality. Our Canvas website will give everyone the ability to access information regardless of ability status. Alternative text, audio captions, and more features will allow the website to be easily used for any individual. Materials such as discussion boards, board games, embedded videos, or unique formats to organize a professor’s home canvas page will help diversify curriculum and engage students in their learning. 

This project was incredibly fulfilling to pursue over the summer. I not only contributed to a useful database for the UofM community, but I also discovered new interests in accessibility and coding. This project was impossible for me to do without my generous and patient mentors Phill Cameron and Philomena Meechan. Philomena and Phill dedicated many hours to helping me understand the expectations and directions of this project. Working with the LRC following my graduation has been very rewarding and I am excited to use my newfound knowledge of web editing and accessibility in the future. 

Source ADA.Gov : “Fact Sheet: New Rule on the Accessibility of Web Content and Mobile Apps Provided by State and Local Governments”