Checking Your Pages for Accessibility with Popetech

The Pope Tech tool is available for free for all CCC institutions, thanks to the CCC Accessibility Center. We've also gotten good results when using the WAVE browser tool in conjunction with the Canvas Accessibility Checker (affectionately known as "the little person/man").

There is currently no single tool that can perfectly identify and remediate all accessibility issues. We recommend using some combination of the Canvas checker, PopeTech, WAVE, UDOIT, DesignPlus (cidilabs) and/or Ally depending on what is available at your college.

Like any tool, these:

work when used correctly,
can create problems if used incorrectly, and
don't cover everything you'll need to check for in your pages.

Your pages will still need human eyes to ensure you've located and fixed all accessibility issues (which is true of any accessibility tool). But these are a great start!

Faculty are reporting that Pope Tech is a godsend when it comes to making accessibility in Canvas easier. If Pope Tech is already enabled in your college's instance of Canvas (you'll find the button down next to the Cancel and Save buttons on each page), here's a playlist of quick tutorials Links to an external site..

The CCC Accessibility Center is generously sponsoring a license to Pope Tech for our system (via grant funding from the Chancellor's Office) so it's free to any CCC. Learn how to get Pope Tech enabled Links to an external site. in your instance of Canvas.

WAVE Accessibility Browser Extension

The WAVE browser tool can be a real time-saver in checking your pages for accessibility errors. You don't have to open the page editor in order to do your check. That means if you don't see any error alerts, you can just move on to the next page. Yea!

Be aware, it can't check color contrast or captions but it's great for heading styles, tables, alt text and lists.

NOTE: With tables, the WAVE tool will let you quickly see if table headers are present but it's easiest to use the Canvas Accessibility Checker to actually remediate the table. The "little person" will walk you through the steps without having to go into the HTML code at all.

The WAVE tool has some quirks so here's a quick video tutorial on how to best use it.

NOTE: The WAVE interface has been updated in the Chrome browser so it will look different than what you see in the tutorial. But it still works the same way.

WAVE Tips

Take a screenshot of the errors before going into the editor so you can remember exactly what and where they were. Alternatively, have the page open in two browser windows, one with the WAVE errors and one in the page editor.

Before toggling into the HTML, add several line spaces above or below where you need to work in the code. That will help you locate the necessary section more easily.

If you're a purist, copy and paste the code into a true code editor, make your changes and then paste the revised code back in Canvas.

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