Course Accessibility: Alt text, Tables, and Lists

Reading Time: 3 minutes

It’s time to dive back into the Canvas Accessibility Checker and chat about the rest of the issues it checks for. This week, we’ll be taking a closer look at image alt text, tables, and lists. 

Alt text

Canvas checks for a few different issues that can pop up with alt text – if an image has alt text, if the alt text is different from the file name, and how long the alt text is. 

Canvas does automatically assign the file name as alt text when you upload an image, so you should rarely get the “no alt text error.” For any of the alt text errors, however, Canvas has added a “generate alt text” below the alt text field to help you replace the text if you’re stuck on what to write. Click this button, and AI will generate alt text for the image. This alt text is not guaranteed to perfect on the first try, so you can either click the “regenerate alt text” or manually edit the text yourself until you’re happy with it. 

Tables

Whenever you use a table in your content, your table needs a caption as well as properly structured headers. These can be a little tricky to do initially (these settings are a little out of the way), but the accessibility makes it easy to quickly apply them. 

Table captions

If your table does not have a caption describing its contents, Canvas will give you a space to fill one in – or generate one using AI. As always, you can regenerate the caption or manually edit it if you are not happy with what the AI generated. 

To add a caption to a table from the rich content editor, make sure you’ve clicked onto the table somewhere. From the top menu, click “table,” then “table properties.” Check the “show caption” box and click save, and Canvas will add a editable caption to the top of your table. 

Table headers

Canvas also checks to make sure that you have cells formatted as headers and that those headers have a scope attached to them (defining what the header applies to). If you are missing headers, Canvas will give you the option of identifying the top row, the first column, or both the top row and first column as needing headers. When you do this, Canvas will automatically define the scope for each of the headers (headers in the top row have their scope defined as the column they’re at the top of, headers in the first column have their scope defined as the row they’re at the start of). 

If you have headers set up for your table but no scope, Canvas will give you options to choose what the header applies to (the column it’s in, the row it’s in, the column group, or the row group). Select an option and click “Set heading scope” for Canvas to update it. 

If you want to set the headers and/or scope yourself in the rich content editor, you can highlight all the cells in your header and click the “table” button in the ribbon, then “cell” and “cell properties.” Here, you can use the drop-down under “Cell type” to choose “Header cell,” and the drop-down under “Scope” to choose what the headers apply to.  

Lists

The last thing that Canvas checks for is if lists are actually formatted as lists. It can be easy to add especially a numbered list as lines of text with manually entered numbers at the beginning. But lists do need their proper formatting so screen readers can read them appropriately! If Canvas finds anything that it thinks looks like a list, you can easily swap it to be in the proper list format by clicking the “reformat” button in the accessibility checker. 

---

We’ve covered all of the issues that Canvas checks for in your course – but we’re not quite done with this series yet. There’s a few other accesibility concers to be aware of, but we’ll save those for another week. In the meantime, if you have questions about the accessibility checker, you can contact Canvas support through the “help” button in Canvas. If you have questions about accessibility and your course overall, you can reach out to the ctl at ctl@cedarville.edu. 

Want to never miss a post? Subscribe here!