PopeTech Accessibility Guide
As you’re working in Canvas, you may notice a new icon in the Rich Text Editor next to the Save and Cancel buttons. This is the PopeTech Accessibility Guide, and it’s an excellent tool for ensuring that your Canvas content is accessible.
PopeTech scans each page in your Canvas course site and highlights issues in six areas:
- Images and Links
- Text and Contrast
- Headings
- Tables and Lists
- Documents and Videos
In each of these areas, you’ll see a few types of issues. Errors are serious accessibility problems that must be addressed. Alerts are issues that may be serious, but require human review to properly assess and correct. There are also Informative notes; these items don’t need correction, but instead are provided to give you extra information about the page layout. And finally, there are Corrections, which show errors and alerts that you’ve successfully fixed!
When you click on the PopeTech icon, a side panel will open with a list of these six areas and any errors and alerts for each. By clicking into an area, you’ll see a detailed list of the issues, along with tools for how to fix it!
For example, if you have an image with the file name left in the alt text field, PopeTech will flag that as an alert: to the software, “image.jpg” is probably incorrect, but it can’t be certain. It needs human review. PopeTech will highlight the image in the Rich Text Editor, as well as show a small thumbnail version in the side panel, and provide the current alt text. If the alt text is wrong, you can change it right through the PopeTech panel and click apply, easily correcting the issue!
There are some limits to what PopeTech can scan. For instance, it can’t check or correct documents attached to the course site, nor can it tell if videos are captioned. Instead, it will detect any of those items and prompt you to review them yourself.
PopeTech Dashboard
In addition to the page-level Accessibility Guide, there’s also a course-level dashboard! This dashboard will scan your entire course and present you with information about accessibility issues. You can see a breakdown of the most common types of errors and alerts, as well as a list of course pages ranked by number of errors. From there, you can go straight to pages with accessibility issues and start correcting them. This is a great way to track your progress—make edits on the pages, rescan your course, and watch the number of issues fall!
Mission: Accessible and PopeTech
If you plan to use PopeTech to improve the accessibility of your Canvas course, make sure to sign up for the Mission: Accessible challenge! The seven core accessibility skills align with the items that PopeTech checks for, so if you update your course using PopeTech, you’ll be completing many of the requirements for Mission: Accessible! If you sign up for the challenge, you’ll get emails with additional information on how to make your course more accessible—and once you’re done, you can submit the course for review by Canvas accessibility pros in IT. Your course will be included in the Mission: Accessible hall of fame, and you’ll get a badge to include in the course site so your students know you’re committed to an accessible, inclusive learning experience.
Want to learn more about PopeTech or accessibility in Canvas? You can reach out to Jim Stachowiak in AccessibleNU for individual or group training; set up a DL consultation; or register for an upcoming training!