You may have multiple copies of files in your course or files with dates that are clearly no longer needed by the students in the course being offered. For example, a syllabus or three from several years prior. Another challenge is that many faculty copy of old courses developed by colleagues that have files not needed for the current offering of the course. 

You can begin deleting or archiving old files one course at a time, perhaps beginning with a course you will be teaching in the near future. If you want to keep some of the files rather than deleting them, you can download them to your computer and then delete them from the class.

Adding Alt Text to your images and graphs in Canvas will help those who use screen readers be able to understand what you have provided on a Canvas page.  Alt Text should convey to the reader what the intent is of the image, not all of the details found in it. This video explores some examples of using Alt Text in a Canvas environment.

If you would like to learn more about using Alt Text, visit this page at the UW Accessible Technology site. 

Canvas has three great ways to make your course more accessible. One is the Link Checker, a tool that looks for broken links in the class. The other two are found in any area where the text editor is visible. For example, on a page of text or the description of an assignment or discussion. One is the "Accessibility Checker" and the other is simply clicking on the red/orange/or green dial in the bottom left corner of any image.

Use the built in text formatting features. You can start doing this on new pages you create, or anywhere you add text in Canvas, and you can go back to old pages and remove formatting that is not using the built in features of headings and paragraph text. You can still bold and underline, but staying away from colored text or using bold/italics/underlining should be kept to a minimum.

A descriptive link is a link on a page that tells the user where the link goes. By contrast, a “dirty link” is the full URL address. For example, if you were going to send a reader to an article about world history and timelines, you might share the link like this: “Wikipedia is one place to find narratives and timelines of world history…”

The same text written as a dirty link would be, “Wikipedia article about timelines of world history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timelines_of_world_history.”

Remove items in the course navigation that are not used in the course. You don’t want students clicking on things that take them to empty spaces. You can manage your course navigation by clicking on the course Settings and then the “Navigation” tab at the top center of the page. You can drag and drop items in the list to hide them from the students view.