Pope Tech is an accessibility scanning and remediation tool that is integrated in Canvas. Pope Tech features both an Accessibility Guide for checking individual pages and a Canvas Course Dashboard.
Please note that both tools are only available to Course Admins (ie. Instructors, Designers, etc.).
What is Web Accessibility?
Web accessibility ensures that websites can be used by everyone, including people with disabilities. While it benefits all users, it’s essential for some. At its core, accessibility is about your students and ensuring that they can engage, learn, and succeed—no matter how they access your content.
What are the Key Features and Benefits of Using Pope Tech?
Pope Tech is designed to make it easier to identify accessibility problems and fix them where possible. The tool scans each page in your Canvas course site and highlights issues in five broad areas:
Images and Links
Text and Contrast
Headings
Tables and Lists
Documents and Videos
From there, accessibility problems are organized into two categories:
Errors ❌ - These refer to serious accessibility issues that need to be fixed.
Alerts ⚠️ - These indicate potential accessibility issues that should be reviewed and fixed as needed.
In addition to scanning your content, the Pope Tech Accessibility Guide provides additional context to learn more about what each issue is and how to address them.
This tool helps you identify and resolve accessibility issues in your Canvas course:
- Clear guidance: See exactly what needs fixing and how to fix it, with alerts for potential issues.
- Learn as you go: Built-in documentation, examples, and tips explain each issue and how to prevent it in the future.
- Quick fixes: Review your Canvas page and make accessibility improvements efficiently.
Open the accessibility guide in any editable Canvas page by clicking on the Pope Tech icon next to the page's Cancel / Save buttons. The guide will display errors, issues, and and additional details for you to review.
Pope Tech offers two types of instructor dashboards to help you monitor and improve accessibility:
- Course Dashboards: View detailed accessibility data for each individual course.
- My Dashboard: See accessibility data across all the courses you teach or manage.
Both dashboards include interactive widgets that highlight where accessibility issues exist and link directly to the areas where you can fix them.
Access your Course Accessibility dashboard clicking Pope Tech Accessibility in your course navigation.
Note: You may be prompted to authorize/enable the tool the first time you open it in a course.
Please note that Panopto videos, PDFs, and other documents are not checked by Pope Tech at this time.
Resources
Need Additional Help?
- To discuss Canvas course accessibility with a member of DLD, please schedule a consultation.
- For help with Canvas, please contact [email protected].