[ARCHIVED] [ARCHIVED] ADA Compliance within Canvas Courses

[mjoaquin]

Hello all! I have looked at the different guides provided in Canvas in regards to meeting and supporting ADA compliance. However, I would love to talk with those of you working with teachers and students on what you are doing to ensure your Canvas courses meet ADA requirements. Did you offer any sort of hands-on training specific to designing with ADA in mind? Did you create a cheat sheet of best practices? Anything unique or unusual that you had success with? Basically, I just want to pick the amazing brains of those of you who are here! 

Thanks! 

[Stef_retired]

 @mjoaquin ‌, I hope to see this post inspire a spirited exchange of ideas! Since it's not likely to elicit a single response that can be deemed "correct," I've changed the format to a discussion. And I've also shared it with the https://community.canvaslms.com/groups/accessibility?sr=search&searchId=0f67a76e-705c-4818-9a4f-eea5...‌ group to get the eyes of specialists on it. If you're not yet a member of that group, you can join by navigating to the home page for the group and selecting Join Group from the Actions dropdown at the upper right of the page.

[mjoaquin]

Thank you stefaniesanders! I wasn't sure where to put it. I really hope to hear from many people as well. 

[lames1]

Thanks for starting up a conversation about Accessibility Misty! It's important that we think about designing our courses to be accessible to all. Canvas has many features that support that quest! The Canvas Training team has developed an Accessibility training webinar for anyone who has our subscription training plan, check it out! Here's the agenda! 

CanvasLive also hosted a webinar on Exploring Accessibility. You can find info about it on this page. 🙂

[mjoaquin]

I am already signed up for the Accessibility webinar that is happening next week. I will check out the CanvasLive session as well. Thanks Deactivated user‌

[kmeeusen]

Hi  @mjoaquin 

We are also fighting this hard uphill battle, and have now redoubled our efforts since our State Board (we are part of a State system of Colleges) published a new Accessible IT Policy that includes our online courses. So................

• We have created a training course for our faculty and staff based on one developed by our State Board. Both are available on Canvas Commons; and, if I may say so myself, are awesome. Search by title: Accessibility 101: Principles of Inclusive Design. We so hope we can get this course mandatory for all faculty. It is currently only mandatory for our staff that work on our web pages.
• We have also integrated a really fine tool developed by the University of Central Florida called UDOIT.  This tool will scan an entire online course for accessibility issues, then after identifying them, help fix them. You can learn more at UDOIT Information , and UDOIT Version 2.1.1 and UDOIT User's Guide 
• Our State Board is currently investigating an even more powerful tool they are considering licensing for our state system called ALLY. While this is a Blackboard (shudder) product, it is truly great, and integrates nicely with Canvas. We have watched some demos, and have a course set up with it in our State Board's Canvas account.
• Our State Board has also selected a preferred vendor to use for closed captioning our course videos - 3PlayMedia. This is a huge, and very expensive challenge, and probably the most obvious deficiency to a student! We can't possibly cover our backlog, but are trying to move forward with captioning for any newly created videos.

Beyond those obvious tools, we coerce, browbeat, cajole, shame, mortify, embarrass, harangue, and generally use every other societal tool we have to get folks to wake up and smell the detriments to student learning and potential lawsuits.

I hope this helps,

KLM

[mjoaquin]

 @kmeeusen ‌ This is incredibly helpful. I am going to commons now to look at the course. I truly appreciate your help! We are a relatively small Pre-K-12 district, so as Canvas admin, I am having to lead the charge for our Canvas courses. 

[ssimpso4]

You're up to the challenge,  @mjoaquin ! 

[mjoaquin]

Thank you ssimpso4‌ only because I am leaning on people like you! 

[ssimpso4]

 @kmeeusen ‌,

Thanks so much for pointing us in the direction of the Accessibility 101 course in Commons. It looks very comprehensive and will likely serve as a great model for the development of something for our PK-12 teacher-users audience.

[dwillmore]

I just pulled your course down and it looks terrific.   We will probably use much of the content in the future.   I also did not know about Ally by Blackboard.   Ally looks great, but I try to stay away from Blackboard offerings.  The offerings may be cheap in the beginning.....

[tmercer]

Thanks for the commons tip!  

[laurakgibbs]

I am bookmarking this to share (and share and share again) with people at my school. We are new with Canvas this year and I keep hoping we will use the transition as a way to talk about these other topics that are about design generally, and not just Canvas. Thanks!

[laurakgibbs]

Just as a small contribution to the discussion, here's a post I wrote this morning on a new project I've started up, transcribing infographics that I think will be useful for my students. Like with videos, infographics need transcripts too! 

https://community.canvaslms.com/people/laurakgibbs/blog/2017/04/04/growth-mindset-infographics-and-a... 

[tross]

There is also a general starting point document in the community that just gives people a basic intro to the concepts of Accessible Design https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-2060 

[QC99_tsilvius]

So glad you stopped by #Canvas4elem tonight,  @mjoaquin ‌. 

[mjoaquin]

Me too QC99.tsilvius‌ it is always a great fast hour of learning! I hope to see some of those great products and suggestions in this discussion!! 

[kari]

 @mjoaquin ‌ I don't know how much assistance I can be from a University standpoint. But, we are about to endure an audit on online accessibility. The university is coming up with a policy for accessibility which I believe is super beneficial in supporting making content accessible. Right now, we host Basic Web Accessibility Training. This is a broad training because it is any content offered online whether or not it is in the LMS.  In this training, we hand out an accessibility cheat sheet. We also created an accessibility web page for our department: Accessibility Resources - Teaching & Learning Technologies - Library Guides at University of Nevada... and the university created a web page Commitment to Accessibility We have hired an Instructional Technologist that strictly works on accessibility. He will be performing hands-on training as well as targeted training.

Captioning, we use Kaltura (Reach) and 3Play. If they want to come through our department, right now the workflow is as follows, and this could change, first video's we caption is direct accommodations. So, a student who has registered with the Disability Resource Center and is enrolled in a class with videos, those videos get captioned first even if they have not been created. (Note: The DRC enters into the course as a student so they experience and evaluate the content as they student needs assistance) Second, comes most watch videos get captioned and then we go down the list. 

We are also rolling UDOIT Information‌ possibly in the Summer. (Like I said we just hired an individual so we are getting him up to speed)

3rd party integrations, we vet each product, first asking for a VPAT then go through internal testing and then our DRC  does testing to make sure that we are not allowing a third party integration that is failing at accessibility. Now, this does not stop instructors from using other 3rd party integrations but I am sure as we move forward we will be able to tell the instructors to find something else or stop using that product so they are in compliances with the university policy.  It has been mentioned about the use of social media in courses, that is something that we are look at creating best practices with too. 

[mjoaquin]

Thank you for sharing this information  @karkajoh ‌. Seeing things from upper ed level helps as well. And I know there are  university level people following this thread!