Accessible Content Checker – Pope Tech

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 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.).

Before you get started, be sure and review our page on Best Practices for Pope Tech in Canvas.

Pope Tech Accessibility Guide - Page-Level Information

The Pope Tech Accessibility Guide is used to identify and fix accessibility issues when in edit mode on the text edit field (Rich Content Editor) of a Canvas course page.

The Pope Tech Accessibility Guide can currently be used in the following areas of a Canvas course site:

Pages
Syllabus
Announcements
Discussions (instructor-entered prompt and instructions field)
Classic Quizzes (instructions field)
Assignments (instructions field)

To activate the Accessibility Guide, click on the Pope Tech button located in the bottom right-hand corner of the Rich Content Editor next to the Save and Cancel buttons.

When activated, the Accessibility Guide appears on the right side of your screen. It uses the Seven Core Skills of accessibility to categorize errors and alerts that need to be addressed on each page. As you move through the guide, it highlights the error or alert in the context of your site and provides suggestions and the ability to easily fix the issue.

To learn more about an error or alert, what it means, why it’s important, and how to fix it, click on the question mark next to each issue. Once you’ve addressed each error and alert on a page via the Accessibility Guide, you can be confident that the page is accessible.

For more information on the Pope Tech Accessibility Guide, watch the following videos:

Pope Tech Accessibility Dashboard - Course-Level Information

In addition to the Pope Tech Accessibility Guide that is available at the page level, a course-level Accessibility Dashboard is also available to you to review a full report of the errors and alerts across your entire Canvas site. The Accessibility Dashboard can help you to prioritize which pages to address and in what order.

The Accessibility Dashboard is enabled in all new Northwestern Canvas courses. To view the Accessibility Dashboard, click on the Pope Tech Accessibility option in your Canvas course menu.

Here’s an example of the data available in the Accessibility Dashboard, showing the number and types of alerts in the course:

Pope Tech Dashboard example

You will also be able to see breakdowns of the number and type of errors and alerts on each page. When you click on the button in the detail column associated with a page, you’ll get a full breakdown of the errors and alerts on that page. When you click on the button in the edit column associated with a page, it will open that page in a new tab with the Accessibility Guide in edit mode:

Pope Tech Dashboard page listing

For more information on the course-level Pope Tech Accessibility Dashboard, watch the following video:

Join Mission: Accessible!

The Pope Tech Accessibility Guide and Accessibility Dashboard are valuable tools in your work to comply with Northwestern's Digital Accessibility Policy. They are also a great way to work through the steps of the Mission: Accessible Challenge to make your Canvas content accessible for all students.

The Teaching and Learning Technologies Team can answer your questions about using Pope Tech's tools and making your Canvas content accessible. Contact us with any questions or to schedule a consultation.