Best Practices for Pope Tech in Canvas

Whether you are building a Canvas course from scratch or editing an existing course, the Pope Tech Accessibility Guide, Northwestern's automated accessibility checker, will help identify and remediate accessibility issues with your content. The Pope Tech Accessibility Guide is a robust tool that has fewer limitations than most automated checkers, i.e., the Canvas Accessibility Checker. Using Pope Tech on your Canvas course site will make it easy to address high-impact accessibility issues in your Canvas content.  

Pope Tech is available by default in all Northwestern Canvas courses. Review Pope Tech's Canvas Documentation Links to an external site. for up-to-date documentation on the use of the tool. Note: both the Pope Tech Accessibility Guide and Dashboard are only scanning content authored in the Canvas platform, not documents uploaded to the course site (i.e., Word documents, PDFs, PowerPoint or Keynote presentations, etc.). 

While the basic use of Pope Tech is fairly straightforward, there are a few best practices which are recommend for use of the tool in Canvas. See below for a list of the best practices, each accompanied by a short video describing its use: 

Copying from Word

When pasting content from a Word document into Canvas, it is advised to use the "Paste as plain text" option when copy/pasting the content and then reformatting the text using the rich content editor (RCE), or if you paste the content in with formatting included, using the "Remove formatting" button in the RCE to remove inaccessible code. Pasting directly from Word with formatting included can cause issues in the HTML that may impact usage for students using assistive technology. 

Removing Redundant Title Text

A "redundant title text" warning means that there is HTML title tag in the code that is redundant with the link text. You don't need both because a screen reader would read both.

An "Empty Link" error means that one of the links present on the web page is empty or contains no text describing where the link will go if clicked or triggered.

Adjusting Heading Font Size

The default size for headings can be changed, but you must first create the heading structure for the text, then use the font size dropdown menu to select the new size.

Use Pope Tech Before Publishing

Lastly, and most importantly, before you publish any content page in Canvas, run the Pope Tech accessibility checker to identify and remediate any issues before publishing. Pope Tech is launched by clicking the button at the bottom of an edit screen to the left of "Cancel" that bears the Pope Tech logo.

Dismiss Specific Results in Canvas

Types of Acceptable Dismissals

Before dismissing any alerts, check to make sure that they are not actually causing an accessibility issue. Here are alerts that are typically ok to dismiss:

  • No heading structure – if there is limited text on a page and no heading is needed, this alert can be dismissed. This is almost always the case when you add an announcement to your course
  • Underlined text – although underlined text can cause someone who is colorblind to think the text is a link, you can dismiss this alert, when it is clear to any user that the underlined text is not a hyperlink
  • Redundant link – in many cases, it ok to have a link on a page multiple times, if you deem it necessary to have a link, such as an email address multiple times on the page, you can dismiss this alert

Do Not Dimiss

There are some situations where the dismiss button should never be used:

  • Errors - errors need to be addressed and fixed, not dismissed
  • Suspicious Alt Text - this alert typically arises when a file name is used for alt text of an image. Alt text should never be a file name, so this type of alert should be fixed and not dismissed
  • Suspicious Link Text - this alert typically arises when hyperlink text does not clearly indicate where the link takes the user (e.g. "Click here", "Read", "More", etc). This type of alert should always be fixed

Dismiss Results in the Accessibility Guide

You can dismiss results while reviewing and fixing issues with the Accessibility Guide. To dismiss an Error or Alert result type from the Accessibility Guide, follow these steps:

  1. Open the accessibility result in the Accessibility Guide.
  2. Select Dismiss.
    Pope Tech dismiss button location.
  3. Type a reason for the dismissal.
  4. If this same exact content is found throughout your course, select 'Dismiss this HTML everywhere it is found on this course?' This dismisses the result anywhere the code is the exact same as this instance.
  5. If the HTML is slightly different, uncheck 'Exact Match?' and change the HTML to what is the same for each instance.
  6. Select Dismiss Result.
    Pope Tech dismissal information screen.

The result is now removed from the Accessibility Guide, Dashboard, and reports. 

Note: It is also possible to dismiss results from the Dashboard. Visit the Pope Tech Blog Links to an external site. to learn more.