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Canvas Course Accessibility Checker

Canvas now offers a Course Accessibility Checker integrated directly into your courses. It is designed to help you identify and address accessibility issues with minimal effort and no additional cost. (Read More) Academic Technology has enabled the feature and it is now globally available to all Siena courses in Canvas. You can find it in the course navigation menu.

What is it?

A central dashboard in your Canvas course navigation that scans your entire course for accessibility issues (like broken heading structures, missing image alt-text, and bad hyperlink formatting) and lets you fix them in one place.

Key Features for Faculty

  • One-Stop Shop: You no longer have to open every individual page to check for errors (i.e., the Rich Content Editor’s Accessibility Checker). The tool provides a “birds-eye view” of the whole course.
  • Wizard-Style Fixing: It uses a guided “wizard” to walk you through fixes. You can update image descriptions or fix headings directly within the tool without jumping back and forth between the editor and the preview.
access the course accessibility checker from the course navigation menu
Dashboard view of the issues identified by the checker

Timeline & Availability

  • Available Now (as of March 3, 2026): It only scans Canvas Pages and Assignments.
  • Coming April 2026: Expanded scanning for Discussions, Announcements, and Syllabi.
  • Note on Files: For now, this tool only scans “native” Canvas content. It does not yet scan uploaded PDFs or PowerPoints.

Important Limitations

  • Edit Alone: To avoid technical glitches, only one person should use the accessibility checker in a specific course at a time.
  • Quizzes: Classic and New Quizzes are not currently included in the scan.
  • Legacy Tool: The existing small accessibility checker inside the Rich Content Editor (RCE) is staying; this new tool simply adds a way to manage the whole course at once.

Read the Instructor Guide to learn more about this exciting new feature.

Acadedmic Technology will incorporate this tool in our weekly training sessions and office hours for web accessibility on Zoom. Come and join us!