How Do I Make a Canvas Course Accessible?

If you teach at a university that uses Canvas, you might assume your course is already accessible. After all, Instructure invests heavily in making Canvas itself WCAG 2.1 compliant. The navigation works with screen readers, the interface supports keyboard-only use, and the platform meets most accessibility benchmarks out of the box.

But here is the part that catches most faculty off guard: Canvas being accessible does not make your course content accessible. The platform is a container. What you put inside it — your PDFs, your PowerPoints, your images, your videos — that is entirely on you.

Think of it like a wheelchair-accessible building. The ramps and elevators are there, but if every office inside has locked doors with no handles, the building's accessibility means nothing. The same applies to your Canvas course.

What Canvas Gives You for Free

Canvas does include several built-in tools that make creating accessible content easier. Knowing what is available is the first step.

The Rich Content Editor is where you build most Canvas pages, announcements, and assignment descriptions. It includes:

• Heading styles (Heading 2, Heading 3, etc.) that create proper document structure for screen readers
• Alt text prompts when you insert images, reminding you to describe them
• List formatting for ordered and unordered lists, which screen readers announce correctly
• Table headers that can be marked for data tables

The Accessibility Checker is a small icon in the Rich Content Editor toolbar (it looks like a person). Click it, and Canvas will flag some common issues: missing alt text, insufficient color contrast, large blocks of text with no headings, and tables without header rows.

These are genuinely useful features. Use them every time you create content in Canvas.

What the Accessibility Checker Misses

The Canvas accessibility checker is a good starting point, but it has significant blind spots. It cannot check:

• Whether your alt text is actually meaningful (it only checks that something is there)
• The accessibility of uploaded files — PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoints, or Excel spreadsheets
• Whether embedded videos have accurate captions
• Complex reading order issues
• Whether linked external content is accessible
• Mathematical notation and formula accessibility

This is where most accessibility gaps live. A course can pass every Canvas accessibility check and still be riddled with inaccessible content because the uploaded materials were never remediated.

Structuring Pages with Proper Headings

Screen reader users navigate pages by jumping between headings. If your Canvas page is a wall of text with bold formatting used as visual headings, it is invisible to assistive technology.

Do this: Use the heading dropdown in the Rich Content Editor. Start with Heading 2 for main sections (Heading 1 is reserved for the page title). Use Heading 3 for subsections. Never skip levels.

Do not do this: Select text and make it bold or increase the font size to create a visual heading. This looks like a heading to sighted users but does not exist in the document structure.

Adding Alt Text to Embedded Images

When you insert an image into a Canvas page, a dialog prompts you for alt text. Do not skip it, and do not write something generic like "image" or "photo."

Good alt text describes the purpose of the image in context. A graph showing enrollment trends needs alt text that conveys the data: "Bar graph showing enrollment increasing from 2,400 in 2023 to 3,100 in 2026." A decorative banner can be marked as decorative so screen readers skip it entirely.

For a deeper guide on writing alt text for academic content, see our post on how to write alt text for educational images.

Uploading Accessible Documents

This is the single biggest accessibility problem in Canvas courses. Faculty upload a syllabus PDF that was created by printing a Word document to PDF without any structure. They upload lecture slides exported from PowerPoint with no alt text on diagrams. They share scanned readings that are just images of text with no OCR.

Canvas cannot fix these files. It serves them exactly as they are. An inaccessible PDF in Canvas is just an inaccessible PDF with a Canvas link.

Before uploading documents, make sure they are accessible at the source:

• PDFs need tagged structure, reading order, and alt text on images. See our guide to making PDFs accessible.
• PowerPoints need slide titles, alt text, and logical reading order. Our PowerPoint accessibility guide covers this in detail.
• Scanned documents need OCR processing at minimum, and proper tagging to be fully accessible.

If you are unsure which files in your course actually need to be accessible, our post on what documents need to be accessible under ADA breaks down the requirements.

Captioning Videos

If you embed or link to videos in your Canvas course, they need accurate captions. Auto-generated captions from YouTube or Zoom are a start, but they are often inaccurate, especially with technical terminology, names, or accented speech.

Review auto-captions and correct errors. For videos hosted in Canvas Studio, you can edit captions directly. For external videos, ensure the hosting platform provides caption editing tools.

Captions are not optional. They are required under both WCAG 2.1 and the ADA, and they benefit far more students than just those who are deaf or hard of hearing — including non-native speakers and anyone watching in a noisy or quiet environment.

Making Quizzes Accessible

Canvas quizzes are generally accessible to screen readers, but there are some common traps:

• Avoid images of text in questions. If a question references a passage, put the text directly in the question field rather than as a screenshot.
• Provide alt text for any images used in questions or answer choices.
• Use the built-in equation editor for math rather than images of equations.
• Avoid drag-and-drop question types when possible, as they can be difficult for keyboard-only users. If you must use them, provide an alternative assessment method.

Link to Accessible Files Instead of Embedding Inaccessible Ones

If you have a resource that is not yet accessible — a legacy PDF, a complex infographic — do not embed it directly in a Canvas page where students have no warning. Instead, provide a text summary of the key content and link to the file with a note about its accessibility status. Then work on remediating the original.

This is an interim measure, not a permanent solution. But it is far better than silently presenting content that some students cannot use at all.

The Bottom Line

Canvas gives you a solid accessible foundation. The platform does its job. The question is whether the content you build and upload does its job too.

Start with your most-used materials: the syllabus, the first few weeks of readings, the most-assigned documents. Check them for proper tagging and structure. Fix what you can. Then work through the rest of the semester.

Need to fix the documents already in your Canvas courses? Aelira integrates with Canvas to scan and remediate course materials — learn more.