RaiderCanvas Accessible Courses Training Recap

Understanding Panorama and Your Accessibility Score

Panorama is a third-party accessibility tool that is built directly into every RaiderCanvas course shell. It automatically scans all files and content in your course and assigns each item an accessibility score, represented by a colored icon. Red hexagons indicate severe issues (most commonly image-only PDFs with no readable text). Yellow triangles indicate major issues such as contrast errors and structural problems. Green hexagons indicate the file has reached the 70% minimum accessibility threshold.

To access your course's overall accessibility score, click Panorama in the left-hand navigation of your Canvas course. If you do not see Panorama in your menu, go to Settings > Navigation, find Panorama in the lower list, and drag it up to enable it. The Panorama dashboard shows your overall course score, lists files with issues, and provides direct access to remediation tools. You can also click the accessibility icon next to any file in your Modules view to open its individual accessibility report—both methods take you to the same Panorama tools.

Panorama rescans your course approximately every 24 hours, but you can manually trigger a reprocess from the Panorama dashboard after making changes to see an updated score more quickly.

Remediating PDFs with the Panorama OCR Tool

The most common severe accessibility issue in Canvas courses is the image-only PDF—a document that is essentially a photograph of a page, with no underlying text that a screen reader can access. Panorama includes an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tool that can convert these files into accessible text-based documents directly inside Canvas, without requiring you to download and re-upload the file.

To use the OCR tool, click the red hexagon icon next to the PDF (or access it through the Panorama report), then select OCR Formats. You have two options: an OCR Overlay, which keeps the original image appearance and overlays selectable text on top of it, and an OCR Reconstruction, which rebuilds the document as a text-based file. The reconstruction is generally more accessible and is the recommended choice. Once the OCR process completes, return to the file's accessibility report, click Update Document, select Replace with Alternative Format, choose the reconstructed version, and click Replace. The original file is overwritten with the more accessible version.

OCR conversion is not perfect—the reconstructed file will likely still have some remaining issues such as a missing document title or untagged headings. After replacing the file, review the updated accessibility report and fix any remaining issues directly in Panorama. Many of these fixes, such as adding a document title or setting the document language, require only a few clicks.

Adding Alt Text to Images in Canvas

Images uploaded to Canvas—including charts, graphs, and standalone image files in your course Files area—need alternative text so that students using screen readers can access the information they convey. Panorama flags images missing alt text and allows you to add it directly inside Canvas without downloading the file.

Click the accessibility icon next to an image file, and Panorama will prompt you to enter an alternative description. Write a concise description of what the image shows and why it matters in context. For a bar chart, for example, you might write "Bar chart showing annual enrollment growth by college, 2020–2025." You do not need to reproduce every data point in the alt text—identify what the image is and what it represents.

If the same image appears in multiple locations throughout your course, Panorama gives you the option to apply the alt text to all instances of this image in the course at once—use this to avoid repeating the same edit across many pages. For images that are purely decorative and convey no meaningful information, mark them as decorative rather than leaving the alt text blank. See the Alt Text Decision Tree for guidance on complex images, graphs, and scientific diagrams.

Video Captions in Canvas Studio

Canvas Studio is the preferred platform for hosting instructional videos in RaiderCanvas. When you upload a video to Studio, captions are generated automatically. The legal captioning standard under WCAG 2.1 AA is 99% accuracy—auto-generated captions are a starting point and must be reviewed and corrected before they meet that standard.

To review captions after uploading, open the video in Canvas Studio, navigate to the Captions tab, and select the English caption track. Studio displays a timestamped transcript of every caption line, and you can click any line to jump directly to that point in the video and edit the text. Pay particular attention to proper nouns, technical terminology, and discipline-specific vocabulary, as these are the areas most likely to contain auto-caption errors. You can also download the caption file if you prefer to edit it in a text editor and re-upload it.

If you have existing videos currently hosted on YouTube, you can add those to Canvas Studio through Create > Add Media and link them from there. Panorama recognizes captions attached to videos in Canvas Studio but does not recognize captions that exist only on YouTube—even if you uploaded a caption file to YouTube separately. Moving your videos to Studio resolves this.

For high-stakes or long-form videos where editing auto-captions is not feasible, Student Disability Services offers a captioning request service. Contact SDS or Digital Accessibility for details on submitting a captioning request.

The Canvas Syllabus Tool

One of the most accessible ways to present your course syllabus is to use the built-in Canvas Syllabus page rather than uploading a PDF or Word document. Content entered directly into the Canvas Syllabus page is rendered as native HTML, which is fully compatible with screen readers and mobile devices. Texas Tech's Canvas template includes required syllabus statements with links already embedded—you simply fill in your course-specific information.

To use the syllabus tool, navigate to your course's Syllabus page and click Edit. Copy your syllabus content into the page fields, updating your course title, instructor information, office hours, course description, learning outcomes, and grading policies. If you also want to provide a downloadable version for students who prefer to print it, a Word document version is perfectly acceptable alongside the Canvas syllabus page—Word files with proper heading styles are well-suited for assistive technology and require no additional conversion. If you provide a PDF version, ensure it is accessible using the workflow covered in the Accessible Documents training.

Quick Wins: Fixing Common Minor Issues

Many of the issues Panorama flags can be resolved in a few minutes. After addressing all red (severe) issues, work through yellow (major) issues next. Common quick fixes include: setting a missing document language (select English and apply), adding a missing document title, and adding alt text to images. For items where Panorama offers a Fix Issue button, clicking it and supplying the requested information resolves the issue immediately without downloading anything.

When a fix applies to a property that is shared across multiple pages—such as a repeated decorative image—use the "apply to all instances" option to resolve it across your entire course at once. This can dramatically reduce the number of flagged items with a single action. A single fix can sometimes eliminate hundreds of minor issues simultaneously.

One issue worth noting: font size smaller than 9 points is flagged by Panorama as a minor issue, but it is a WCAG AAA requirement—not the AA standard that the April 2026 DOJ ruling requires. If this is flagged in your course, it is not a priority concern and does not need to be addressed to meet the legal compliance threshold.