In accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act’s new Title II requirements for public institutions, by April 24, 2026, all university websites and digital course content must meet or exceed the WCAG 2.1 AA standard.
To help you meet this requirement, here are five simple, practical tips faculty and staff can use now to make courses more inclusive and aligned with this mandate:
1. Clear out unused Canvas content
Archive or delete outdated materials in old courses using tools like TidyUp. TidyUp is a tool in Canvas that quickly identifies unused Canvas items, files, and folders. Streamlined content makes it easier to spot and fix accessibility gaps.
2. Use Canvas accessibility tools
Anthology Ally, directly integrated into the Canvas learning management system, evaluates the accessibility of your course content and provides instructors feedback to improve course accessibility. Visit the Ally instructor guide or watch this short overview video to see how Ally works.
3. Add meaningful alt text, headings and logical structure
For those who use screen readers or are visually impaired, there are seven simple steps that can be taken for accessibility, involving built-in heading styles for structure, writing meaningful link text, and adding alt-text to images. Using proper heading levels and descriptive alt text for images and ensuring your documents and pages fold into a navigable outline helps screen reader users and improves search engine optimization.
4. Improve video and multimedia accessibility
Video content needs to be just as accessible as written text. Instructors should provide real-time captions for live lectures, upload transcripts and enable machine captions. Kaltura has several ways to make content accessible. Check out the accessibility page’s resources and dive deeper into how to make audio and video accessible.
5. Join trainings to build knowledge
There’s a wealth of knowledge available depending on what you want to learn: the accessibility page holds a variety of resources that can help with your questions., IU Expand offers a free, self-paced course that walks through some simple steps for creating more inclusive digital content, and IT Training has resources on web accessibility, instructional content and course materials, and creating accessible documents.