Creating an Accessible Canvas Course

Designing and creating an accessible Canvas course is important to ensure the best opportunity for success for all your students.

If you need technical assistance with Canvas course design, consider attending an Academic Technology training or scheduling a consultation with the Academic Technology Consultants. If you have questions about how to create accessible content in Canvas, please contact DigitalAccessibility@colorado.edu.

Provide Information to Students

  • Walk through your Canvas course with your students. Consider doing this both synchronously on the first day of class and asynchronously via a screen recording that students can watch on their own. Identify important areas of the course and where they can find all essential information and content.

  • Make sure to include the required Accommodation for Disabilities statement in your syllabus.

    • Required Syllabus Statements (.docx).

    • If you wish to create your syllabus directly in Canvas, you can use the accessible syllabus template block labeled “Institutional Template", which will auto-populate the required statements for you. For a tutorial on how to access this template, you can find it on the Canvas - Cidi Labs Design Tools (located about ¾ of the way down this page under “How to Access Templates”).

    • Consider providing a link to the academic support page for students in your course.

  • Let students know upfront and in writing:

    • Which third-party tools or software they will need to use during the semester.

    • Whether they will need to participate in any activities or meetings outside of class time or at a different location.

    • How you plan to communicate with students and how you’d like them to communicate with you, particularly related to office hours and emails.

      • If you will be using Announcements to communicate, notify student so they can enable notifications appropriately.

  • Share your course content as far in advance as possible, and for as much content as possible. Providing students with your slide decks in advance of class means students can review them in advance if they are unable to or prefer not to listen to lecture and view the slides simultaneously.

Organize Your Content

  • Use Cidi Labs to create your course for a consistent and clear visual design.

  • Use consistent naming conventions for Assignments, Pages, Modules, Quizzes, and Discussions.

  • Remove unnecessary items from your navigation menu. 

  • Remove unnecessary content from your Canvas Files if you copied your course from a previous semester and will not be reusing all of the content.

  • If you organize Modules by week, include dates in your Module names. For example, use “Week One - Aug 22-26” rather than just “Week One”.

  • Use your course Calendar tool and due dates to help students keep track of deadlines. You can add events to your course calendar, including office hours, and you can use Assignments (non-graded or graded) to track all due dates for students.

Make Your HTML Content Accessible

Make Your Documents Accessible

Make Your Video Content Accessible

Provide Flexibility Where Possible

  • Learn about Universal Design for Learning to understand more about why this practice is beneficial for students. Consult the Canvas guide to UDL course design.

  • Provide flexibility in participation methods. For example, allow students to earn their participation by contributing to discussion boards on Canvas, participate in synchronous discussions in class, communicating in a group setting or 1-to-1 setting with peers, or any other way you see fit for your course objectives.
  • Offering virtual office hours is a good way to allow more students to attend. Depending on a student’s disability or disabling condition, visiting office hours in person can be especially difficult.