Course Accessibility

by | Jul 21, 2025 | Accessibility, Canvas, Panopto, Tech Tools

Overview

Making course content accessible for all students is clearly the right thing to do. We know this goes beyond making accommodations for students who need them. Everyone benefits when content is formatted using accessibility standards and when videos are captioned. Part of acting in good faith as University employees involves adhering to University policies related to access and accommodations, but this will involve attention and dedication to the process.

Accessibility Requirements

As of April 2026, all Western courses are required to follow a higher baseline of accessibility as the ADA requires standards to the AA level. These new standards may seem overwhelming, but there are a variety of tools and support available at Western to help in the process of making digital content more accessible.

Tools

Watch the videos on the Pope Tech Dashboard and Accessibility Playlist for an in-depth explanation of the accessibility requirements, how to meet them, and how to use and set up the tools listed below.

Pope Tech Dashboard

With Pope Tech’s Accessibility Dashboard added to the left navigation bar in Canvas, faculty have easy access to this evaluation tool. While Western has utilized the Pope Tech page scan tool (a.k.a., Accessibility Guide) for some time, the Dashboard allows faculty to scan all content pages in each course in one pass. It presents detailed results of alerts and errors and then guides you in correcting those accessibility issues. These issues are sorted into Errors (the most important elements to fix) and Alerts (potential problems to check). While Pope Tech can locate and help you fix most issues, it is still important to understand the basics to know what you are fixing–and to potentially learn how to build accessible content moving forward.

Accessibility Basics

LLATCH

For page content, LLATCH is our acronym that stands for links, lists, alt text, tables, colors, and headings. These are the key items to properly format in documents and any editable content area in Canvas, our learning management system.

  • Links should have meaningful titles and go where they’re supposed to.
    • Have meaningful titles.
    • Go where they’re supposed to.
  • Lists should use formatted bullets rather than typed-in characters.
  • Alt Text should:
    • Effectively and briefly describe images for the visually impaired. It can be automatically generated in Canvas, be written by you, or you can upload your image to Western’s Descriptive Alt Text Generator to generate alt text to copy-paste into the image alt text description.
    • Not be used for decorative images, which should have the “decorative image” box checked in the alt text area.
  • Tables should:
    • Be captioned.
    • Use table headers.
    • Avoid empty, split, or merged cells.
    • Not be screenshots or image-based.
    • Not be used to layout content on a page.
  • Colors should be high contrast, such as black on white or dark blue on pale grey. Use a Contrast Checker to analyze your colors.
  • Headings should appear in order from H1, H2, H3, etc. without skipping levels. You can change the size of a header, but the heading styles should maintain a hierarchy.

CATCH

For digital media, CATCH is our acronym that stands for captions, audio descriptions, transcripts, clarity/readability, and help with playback. At Western, our Panopto Video Management System automatically captions videos–and also allows creators to edit and improve those captions, add audio descriptions, and even a table of contents.

  • Captions
    • In Panopto editor mode, you can navigate to Captions and edit caption time codes and edit to improve the captions that are automatically generated.
  • Audio descriptions
    • In Panopto editor mode, you can go to Audio Description and add a written description of imagery or graphics, if they are meaningful, in your recorded presentation for the visually impaired. Note that users can enable audio descriptions during a video, if desired, and video playback will pause to play the audio of these audio descriptions.
  • Transcripts
    • If you are using a video by someone else on YouTube with no captions, you can instead create a transcript.
      • Google NoteBookLM can generate a transcript if you add a reference, paste the YouTube link, and ask the AI to generate the transcript. This may need to be edited/corrected.
      • Similarly, YouTubeToTranscript.com can generate a transcript for free.
    • To create a transcript with time codes included, try NoteGPT or TacTiq.io
  • Clarity/Readability
    • Rather than using audio descriptions, you can read out the information on the slide during your presentation. As an example, if your recorded lecture goes over a table displaying the deadlines for your course, you can clearly describe the deadlines for each course assignment and everything in the table.
    • When presenting, make the browser for a screenshare as big as possible.
  • Help with Playback

PDF Accessibility

Adobe Acrobat

You may have access to Acrobat Pro through your department; if so, it can check accessibility for your PDFs. While this tool doesn’t jump you to each problem like Pope Tech does, it does state the issues in your document.

Sensus Access

Sensus Access can be accessed through Western’s Disability Access Center (DAC), and will check your document on upload, scan it, and make it more accessible and/or convert it to another format. However, the document will likely still need to be checked by a human!