Too long; didn’t watch
- Accessibility checker appears wherever you see the Rich Content Editor.
- Among other things, adding alt text to images in CarmenCanvas is important for accessibility.
Transcript
As you are editing or creating content in CarmenCanvas, there is a built in accessibility checker that can help you check for things like images that are missing alt text or color contrast that’s actually very hard to read. So this is the page that I’m going to work off of. And if I come in here and click on edit, you can see anywhere in Canvas, anywhere in CarmenCanvas that you have the rich content editor, or this up here which appears at the top of a page it appears at the top of an assignment, a discussion, a quiz. Anywhere you see this, you should also have the accessibility checker just below the content itself.
So there’s a two here which lets me know there are two issues on this page that need to be fixed. So if I click on the accessibility checker, it’s going to pop up and tell me what the issue is. It highlights the image in question and says, Hey, this image, the only alt text is the file name, which is not descriptive. So I can change that. I can come in here and I can, for the sake of time, choose the text that I already wrote and put in a description here. This has multiple uses by changing the alt text. Here’s another one that has the file name which doesn’t tell anyone using a screen reader why this image is here or what it’s telling them, or why it matters. So it helps those who are using screen readers, but it also helps those who are having trouble with their internet connection or the image doesn’t load for some reason.
And so now it says, great, no issues were detected. I get balloons and confetti, I can click save. There are no longer accessibility issues. And what’s tricky about this is you don’t see anything different. For a sighted user, the alt text does not appear and that’s fine. That’s as it should be. But for users of screen readers now, it would say “image: screenshot of the page that results from using the undelete function in CarmenCanvas”, which is better. I could probably do better than that, but that’s better than nothing. Or if someone has a really slow internet connection. Or if Canvas is only half working, or who knows what and the image just doesn’t appear, the alt text will display in its place and that tells a sighted user what was supposed to be there and the purpose that it served. So alt text actually helps everybody. In the case of the internet going out or even if it is working, it’s good to have. So good to know. The accessibility checker is there and it will guide you through the changes you need to make.