In this episode we'll hear from Michelle Newhart, Instructional Designer, that features a Spring Flex Day Session that she originally presented with Hugo Aguilera, Applications Training Specialist called Accessibility By Design-Preparing Accessible Courses to Meet ADA Title II Deadline. The session focuses on why accessibility matters, what the April 2026 deadline means for Mt. SAC, and how accessibility in Canvas is crucial to meeting this deadline.

Some of the themes that are explored are the difference between accessibility and accommodations, how meeting the deadline can be approached in a manageable way, and how the main priority is to make actively used digital content more accessible.

The ADA Title II deadline is not just a legal requirement but related to our commitment to DEISA+ (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Social Justice, and Access Plus). This work is important in creating an equitable and just learning environment for all students, and not just for those without disabilities.

We hope the session helps you get a clearer sense of the deadline, as well as what compliance involves, and helpful pointers on how to take small steps towards accessibility in your Canvas course shells. Enjoy!

Resources:

ADA Title II 2026 Regulation Changes: Documentation, Training and Other Resources, Collected by Members of the California Community Colleges Council of Chief Librarians

https://www.mtsac.edu/accessibility/ Mt SAC's accessibility website

https://mtsac.instructure.com/courses/96251 Canvas Hub called "Faculty Accessibility Center" available to Mt SAC Faculty only (requires log-in).

https://mtsac.instructure.com/enroll/9R7PTJ Canvas Course called "Accessibility Challenge" again only accessible by Mt SAC Faculty. Meant to help us meet the deadline.

Run Time: 52 min, 25 sec

To Find the full transcript for this episode click HERE

The entire web content accessibility guidelines is explicitly based on is it perceivable, is it operable, is it understandable, and is it robust? They have that in their website. They organize all of the rules by these four principles. What matters, the thing I want you to pay attention to, is the intent.

Welcome to the Mount San Antonio College Podcast. I'm Chisa Uyeki, a Mount SAC professor and librarian, and I'm pleased to be your host for this season. Our goal is to keep you connected to our campus by bringing you the activities and events you may not have time to attend to share the interesting things our colleagues are creating and innovative ways they are supporting and connecting with Mount SAC students. Join me as we explore Mount sac

Hi and welcome back. This is Ivan Sanchez, one of your co hosts of the Mount SAC Podcast and today we're featuring a segment from a Flex Day session that was called Accessibility by Preparing Accessible Courses to meet the ADA2 deadline. This was presented by Michelle Newhart and Hugo Aguilera. The session focuses on why accessibility matters, what the April 2026 deadline means for Mount Sac, and how accessibility in Canvas is crucial to meeting this deadline. Some of the themes that are explored are the differences between accessibility and accommodations, how meeting the deadline can be approached in a manageable way, and how the main priority is to make actively used digital content more accessible. The ADA2 deadline is not just a legal requirement, but related to our commitment to DA sub diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice, and access. Plus, this work is important in creating an equitable and just learning environment for all students. We hope this session helps you get a clear sense of the deadline as well as what compliance involves. And lastly, some helpful pointers on how to take small steps towards accessibility in your Canvas course. Shells. Enjoy.

My name is Michelle Newhart and I am here with my FCLT colleague Hugo Aguilera. As many of you know, we work in the Faculty center for Learning Technology. We're a dedicated resource to support faculty with all things instructional technology, and we want to support you in using tools well to create great pedagogy for your students. And we have a lot of resources for you about accessibility and many other things. So how do you feel about your content's accessibility right now? All right, let me share the results here. How is everybody feeling? Well, it looks like everybody is feeling very productive today and ready to work on it, or at least 70% of you are. We have 20%. Jose.

I have questions, a few who are feeling the cool cat and two who are just feeling like accessibility is the worst. So we'll see how you feel after we go over the things we're going to go over today. But that's good to get your temperature and see how things are going at the start here. I think the first important thing to talk about is the differences between accessibility and accommodations. So any thoughts? What's the difference between accessibility and accommodations? Right. Accessibility. All have access for accommodations. Making a change for someone great.

Accommodations are provided with students with documented disabilities. That's right. Our courses must be accessible and access provides accommodations. Good point, Sandra. Accessibility is proactive and accommodations as reactive. Absolutely. Chase, very good answer. Also, Tracy.

Yeah, I like that. Great answers in the chat. I feel like at the beginning of this talk about accessibility, it's important to establish what accessibility is and what it is not. So you guys have hit on point where the difference is really the accessibility has to do with the content. It's about the state of your content, regardless of your audience. And the accommodations have to do with the student so they are individualized to individuals and their needs. Whereas accessibility is more about the default state of the content so that it serves the most most people and the most diverse range of people that it can serve without them having to ask for any type of accommodation to be able to access that content. So this is a really important place to start talking about accessibility because it's important for you to understand that you don't have to solve accessibility.

For every possible scenario of a student who you imagine attending your class, you need to meet a specified list of things that your content meets in order to serve the most people, and that work's already been done. It really is a discrete list of a specific number of things. All of those things have some details about how they work, and we're going to talk about those. But it means that when. When something isn't met by the accessibility, that's when accommodations come in and are individualized to the student who requires those additional elements to be able to access the content properly. But that is not something that you have to calculate as you make your content accessible. We all know accessibility is important. It's important because it's a requirement.

It's the law. It's the law for everybody who is, you know, all public entities, whether it's government entities or all public colleges, they're required to meet accessibility laws. It's also our local policy. It aligns with our mission to serve diverse population with education. It is a foundational practice of equity to make things accessible. It isn't the only way you can meet excess equity. But it often is one of the foundational pieces in the base of meeting equity and it really helps create more thoughtful and consistent design. The truth is, accessibility is about your digital content.

It's about all digital content, and it can be a part of your content creation or editing process once you understand the things that you need to implement. Accessibility really only takes longer if you're not thinking about it until the end and then treating it as a separate step. If you add a couple of practices and how you create things as you go along, you'll really reduce the amount of time you have to spend independently on accessibility tasks. You're probably here because you heard that in April 2026 Mount Sac has to be in compliance with the new expanded accessibility laws and we have to meet what's called WCAG 2.1 AA level. So I'm going to talk about Title 2 and the accessibility laws and what changed. I'm going to talk about what is WCAG, what is 2.1 and what is AA, and then we are going to talk about the actual accessibility elements that you are expected to meet in your materials. Title 2 Title 2 is a part of ADA as part of Americans with Disabilities act, and the truth is, most things about the Americans with Disabilities act have not changed. Accessibility has been the law for quite a while.

And if you've ever taken spot, if you've ever created a distance learning amendment form for a course, if you have done any of these things related to doing your courses in canvas, you probably have encountered, if you've looked at our AP for distance learning, all of these things reiterate that requirement. They tell you you must meet accessibility. You must meet these specific principles of accessibility. You are agreeing to do that in your courses. Some people do and some people don't. Because the way this is enforced is there's not a specific method of enforcement. Right? It's an honor system. You are accountable for your own materials.

We do not currently have a review process that goes in and ensures that you're doing that as an audit of access at our institution. At this point in time, however, nothing changed about the method of enforcement in the new law. So the method is the same. It's still enforced by complaint. If individuals with disabilities file a complaint or the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division or the US Department of Education Office of Civil Rights has the ability to open investigations or carry out compliance reviews, and they can also compel government institutions or universities and colleges to enforce this rule. These are the exact same rules that they were before April 24, 2026. And they're the rules that will still exist after April 24, 2026. The main thing that changed in Title 2 was a commitment to greater enforcement.

And in April 2024, two years ago, the US DOJ issued the rule that requires digital content to meet WCAG 2.1 level AA. In the past, there was not a set benchmark for what the accessibility standard was. So if a complaint was filed and that case went to court, the court decided on a case by case basis, what was the benchmark for determining if the course was accessible or if the materials of the college or the institution or whatever it was, met the law, met the accessibility law. So now that is not determined on a case by case basis anymore. The universal standard, same for everyone, is the WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Now, our deadline is April 24, 2026, to be in compliance. And that is the deadline for public entities that serve a population of over 50,000. So that means some of if you're an adjunct and you haven't heard too much about this at your institution, well, at other institutions, and maybe they're not too worried about it yet because they have a whole other year to get this done.

Anybody who's under 50,000 serving, their deadline is April 24, 2027. So you might start seeing that crop up later at other institutions that are smaller than ours. But because we are big, we are due this year. Do a little myths and facts. So let's see what you think. Are you individually legally liable? Can you be sued for accessibility based in Title two? All right, I see a couple of emojis. I see our reactions, I see a lot of yeses in the chat. So at least as far as Title 2 is concerned, lawsuits are typically brought where they are brought against public entities, which means they're brought against the college, or they're brought against the state or local government or department, not against an individual.

So it is very rare to see an individual named as the defendant in the lawsuit for Title 2 compliance issues. It's actually the college or district that's much more likely to be sued for lack of meeting a title to accessibility. However, the college obviously relies on all of us to meet that, and we carry that out through the materials that we provide publicly, whether it's to employees, whether it's through courses, to students, whether it's on the website, anything, whether it's on the Internet and just provided between specific committees or groups or any of that kind of stuff. All of those are things that are meant to be accessible. It is Possible that your materials would be part of what is scrutinized in a particular lawsuit. However, Title 2 specifically, mostly aimed at institutions, not individuals, but the next one. Do you have to fix everything? Every old file that you have, everything under the sun to be in compliance. What do you think? I see.

I hope not. Some yeses, some I hope nots. If a student needs access to the material. Good answer. I don't know, but it would be a good idea. Short answer, no, you don't have to do everything under the sun. The focus is on anything in active use. And we're going to look at what the exemptions are to this rule.

They have laid them out. They are narrow, but just in practical terms. Prioritize what's in use, what's in use by students, what's in use in any employee groups that you're in or any committees you're on. Those things are the focus for accessibility. Title 2 names Specific things that must be made accessible. Digital content is everything that's online, right? So it means anything that's in the portal, it means anything that's on the website, it means anything that's in the canvas. It means course pages. It also means any documents that you share digitally.

That's usually where people glaze over because documents are sort of, in my opinion, like the layer that feels when the overwhelm kicks in. But yeah, slides, videos, the media player itself. Third party tools. Anything that's accessed online does not matter if it's extra credit or required. Does not matter if you are teaching an in person class and providing stuff online. If it is in the digital format, it has to meet accessibility rules. Right? What are the exceptions? The exceptions are you do not have to make all your old files accessible. So basically, archived content.

Archived content has specific definition. It's archived if it was created before the compliance date. So anything you make after April 24, 2026, you're supposed to be making access. It has to be something that's not actively used. It's stored in a separate place from active files in an archive and it is not being modified after it's been archived. It's just there as a reference, as part of required storage of certain records and that kind of thing. It's not something that you are manipulating anymore or mixed in with your active elements. The other exception, third party materials.

Third party materials include things that are not owned or controlled by the college. So fortunately our units on campus like it and our library already have adopted policies where the procurement of tools involves an accessibility review. That's considered when any tool is purchased by the college. The library also considers the accessibility of materials and only adopts materials from publishers in like in video databases and the like if they meet accessibility rules. So you can feel good about using institutionally available items because knowing that they have been vetted for that reason and that they are, they should be available with accessibility by default. However, the bad news about third party materials, if you adopted it as a part of your curated class, it's now your responsibility. So that means the one exception is if you have to reference something that's outside of the institution's control. Say you teach something that has a professional certification or professional association and you have to send students there.

But that place you don't have control over their website, but you have to be able to use it or the institution does. We're not responsible for that. But individuals adopting specific tools into their courses or specific vendors, publishers for instance, if their materials are not accessible, even though they should want to make them accessible because their education audience is all required to have accessible items, then it becomes your problem if you are linking to them and asking students to use them in your class, which means you know there's a little bit of work to do there to figure out whether everything you're using is accessible, including external items. So basically, if you have an archive file for your committee and it's got minutes that go back to like, you know, 1987 or whatever, you don't have to go in and make all of those minute notes accessible. If they are truly an archive and are no longer changing or just there for storage, fine. That's not your priority to go back and make things from the past work if they are simply there to provide reference. Same for your past Canvas courses. Unless of course you pull that Canvas course into an active shell and then you need to make that new active version of it accessible, you're not responsible for things that students post on social media, or our college is not responsible for those types of things to make sure that that person posted something that was accessible.

Or things inside third party platforms where you don't have to control. But if you opt to use a tool or you opt to use an external website that isn't accessible, then that can become your responsibility. So things you're using as templates, like if you use last year's syllabus template and you're still modifying it and working with it, even though folder it's an archive, you should still make that item accessible. Anything that's still actively used is the priority. Is the bottom line. It's very practical in that sense. Now, let's talk about WCAG. So what is WCAG? What is 2.1 and what is level A8? WCAG stands for web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

It has been developed and maintained by an international group called the World Wide Web Consult Consortium. These are global rules for the Internet, for the Web. And they have maintained a standard, a technical standard for making web content accessible to people with disabilities. And 2.1 is just the version that they are on. In fact, they're past 2.1. There's been a 2.2, there's been a 3.0 that's under development now. But 2.1 is often the one given for legal guidelines because it is a stable set of rules. That is, even though they may be working on evolved versions, and these versions may change over time.

Right now, the stable version is 2.1. So that's the one they recommend. And as you can see, there are three levels of conformance. A being the base minimum, AA being the recommended one, and AAA being going above and beyond. And level AA is the standard target in laws and policies. And that's because it's felt to represent achievable accessibility that still makes content work for the widest range of people. So there is a website. You can look at the entire Web Content Accessibility Guidelines online.

It's an open resource, but it has a lot of stuff in it that is about what people do when they create programs, create vendors, who create programs, people who create interfaces. There's a lot of rules that apply to, like, the people who developed Canvas, for instance, and what their menus look like and what their contrast of their materials are and things like that. So there's a lot of rules in there that won't necessarily be rules for you because you're creating content within that program, not making that program. And WebAIM is an organization at Utah State that is basically like a translator of WCAG into the language that, you know, everybody can, can understand and follow. Gives a bunch of tips. It breaks it all down. Very helpful interpreter of wcag, specifically for university environment, college and universities. All of the web content accessibility guidelines are based on POUR principles.

POUR stands for perceivable, operable, Understandable, and robust. So why am I talking about the poor principles? Well, because the entire Web Content accessibility guidelines is explicitly based on is it perceivable, is it operable, is it understandable, and is it robust. They have that in their website. They organize all of the rules by these four principles. And here's a more lengthier description of them. I just want to say it isn't so important that you as an individual can distinguish between is that a perceivable thing or an operable thing? Is that an operable thing or a robust thing? Who, who cares? Like they overlap, right? There's. There's a certain amount of overlap there. But what matters thing I want you to pay attention to is the intent, right? Because poor why people talk about the poor principle is because the poor principle talks about not the how but the why.

Why are we doing this? What is the intent of the rules? Basically every one of these intents is about somebody being able to to use the content, right? Accessibility is a subset of usability and it's about making content usable for the most people. So the intents talk about, you know, even if they're accessing it in a non typical way, even if they're using some old device or some old version, even if they decide to navigate one way versus another and people choose different, different ways to get to your modules or choose different ways to go from your syllabus to an assignment or whatever. Like all of the ways work, they go from a mobile phone versus a web versus a tablet. Can it work on all of those things that someone who can't use a mouse or can't see the screen, can't hear what's going on, can they still use the content? So all of these things are about making that content usable. I just had a quick question about the if they can't see the screen, I was at a good workshop where they talked about if you're doing a demo, narrate it so they're understanding it. But if I've posted a document or a page that they read, I know in many DSPs offices or accommodation offices they can put it in curd sale. Speech to text. Do I as the instructor need to provide a speech to text document some kind of app or something? Or can I direct them to the disabilities accommodation office? That's a great question.

So the ability to do that kind of work with your content really does start to bridge into accommodations. However, I feel very lucky to be able to say we actually have those tools in Canvas by default. So the main thing is to know about them and to be able to point where they are and point them out to students and encourage them to use it. Because we can have all the tools in the world. But if the instructor never mentions it, students don't use it. If they aren't pointed to, then people don't know they don't never explore and don't know that they're there. So as an example, Canvas itself has several choices that are individualized to a student. For instance, they can toggle on Dyslexia font for everything.

They can also put it into high contrast mode so that it will increase the contrast of every element in Canvas and also it will make sure it uses underlining for links and things like that in order to call them out better. In addition, we have Microsoft Immersive Reader turned on which is found in the upper right corner of each page. And it provides several services including it will read the page, it will simplify the format of the page. It will also provide several reading focus elements and it will allow them to change the background color, the font size and it will just read the page to them. And within readspeaker it also will read the page or a selection from the page. It will allow them to change the font size, focus in on things, put up focus barriers so it's only on the part that they are reading. It will read while they listen and scroll for them so they're following right along with it. To help those who have trouble focusing, it can be a huge reading aid, not just for people with visual difficulties, but people who maybe, just maybe ADHD and just like have trouble staying focused on a reading it can read it to them.

They can listen while they're looking at it and potentially retain more focus for that item. So we have a bunch of tools, I'm very happy to say that help personalize those functions. And for accessibility, the hardest part of accessibility often are the specific little bugaboos that people have about accessibility. You know, they're trying to do math in a document and they want to know how to do that. Or they they work in art history and there aren't alt text on the whole entire collection of all western art and how to deal with that or any other many other number of things of how to fix specific problems. They want to use a specific app and they don't know if that app is going to work. These are all solvable problems, but they're all specific problems. So I want to stick with the core today, but I want to encourage you if you have specific problems.

We have several resources available that we'll talk about towards the end that can support you. Including our unit is here to support you to get answers to those kind of questions. And remember, accessibility of digital content is always related to the type of content. So text has specific things, links, use of color, images, audio, Synchronous meetings, videos and documents. They each have elements, and documents are really the same as text and images or whatever is in your document, plus a few things that have to do with it being in a document format. I want to talk about text. What needs to happen with text in order to make it accessible? And the main thing is, if you use the rich content editor tools in Canvas, the little toolbar icons above the field where you edit, you're adding structure to your page by choosing to use headings from there and bullet lists from there. It's a very easy thing to do rather than just putting text, making it bold and making it bigger.

Instead, just mark it as a heading and it will create the structure on the page that helps support screen readers navigating that content. A lot of the things to do with text are mainly about helping screen readers access and navigate pages. But as I said before, accessibility supports all people. So anybody who would want to use those tools I was telling you about that are natively available in Canvas with the immersive reader or the read speaker like this supports them as well. Screen readers are actually, they're reading the HTML and everything we work on is HTML. Everything in Canvas is HTML. Everything on our website is HTML, which means, like, we always see the pretty version and we get to choose our HTML by just choosing the icons and then it applies it. And we don't have to look at the HTML writing, but it's always there behind the scenes telling it what to do with that content.

And. And screen readers use that to know how to find the headings, for instance, or which things are a list, which things are links. And so it can do all kinds of things. Like, I might give you flashbacks to Fomar here, but like, one of the things I talked about way back in Fomar days during the Pandemic, was about how when I was younger, you know, maybe some of you will remember this, like when you had cassette tapes and you had like a song you wanted to listen to, and so you'd like be trying to like fast forward, rewind, fast forward, rewind, find the beginning of the song. And then they came out with that great technology where your, your player would know where to stop, where there was a gap, and then you could just fast forward and it would stop automatically when it hit it. And then of course, we had CDs and like now we're in streaming. Everything's changed a lot really, if you think about it for all this time. But what you're doing for screen readers is you're making it so they don't have to fast forward and rewind, fast forward and rewind to try to find places where content is chunked up visually on the page, but not for them.

If you didn't create structure on the page through headings, so you're allowing them to jump around through different sections more easily and you're just making it easier for them to use. And by the way, headings in general, both visual and structured for non visual users, are great because they chunk content and help students avoid cognitive overload. They help create coherence and group things together and that helps with retention. So how you make your headings and how often you make your headings and how you group your content can have a big effect on your students ability to hold things in working memory and to retain them over the longer term. So definitely recommend using headings. There's always some kind of fix for accessibility that is exactly the opposite of its intent. Like, oh, if it's hard to make headings, then I just won't put any headings. Well, that is definitely worse for everyone, including visual and non visual users.

So, you know, we want to encourage you to keep the poor intent in mind of increasing usability for everyone when we implement accessibility. And headings are so easy to do. It's easy to work into your creation process, so you just quit doing it some other way. Every time you want to make a heading, you use the style editor to do it or you use CityLabs, which actually is a very nice way to make headings because number one, they're more graphical and so you can always tell if you did it or you didn't do it. Number two, they allow you to make things look visually more appealing without having to put text on images. It's still text on the page and so it's more accessible than making banners that have text on images, which is no longer text, it's an image. So this is a recommended practice list. Also super easy to use from the menu in Canvas and City Labs actually expands the capabilities of lists.

It offers different bullets. It offers the ability to sometimes I don't know if you've tried to do this in Canvas before, but like you try to make a numbered list but then you have something in the middle and then you want the list to continue, but it doesn't continue, it starts back at 1. City labs will help you around that. It will let you choose where that second list starts. So it really is continuous list and it will allow you to add space between your items to make it visually actually easier to look at as well. So it has a lot of nice features both ways, very easy to make it accessible. Next item, URL Links URL links Here I'm showing the little link up in the Rich Content Editor and it shows that there's two types of links, external links and content links. You always want to use content links for internal content because when you course copy, it's going to maintain.

It's not going to include the course number, it's just going to include the page number, it's going to change the course number. So all your links will stay within the course and still work inside internal to the course, whereas external links will keep the course number and they'll still point back to your old course. You can use Rich Content Editor to set links on top of text. All you have to do is highlight the text, click on the link, put in the link, then it lays on top of text. And the reason you want to do this is so that the link can be read by a screen reader. URLs are just a bunch of characters with no spaces in between. They may or may not be words, but they won't be read as words by a screen reader because it can't tell where one word starts and one word ends. So they will be read character by character, which I think has to take a great amount of patience that I certainly don't have.

So I don't know how people put up with that. But if you do have to share the raw URL, just take the hyperlink off of it. It'll automatically put it on it when you space after the link. Then just click back on link options and say remove link. Right? Leave it as text on the page. That's fine. Just don't make the the raw URL, the one that HTTP or www don't make that the actual link. Put the link on real text.

If you need to list the HTTP one, just make it plain text. If it's a super long link, you can always use a link shortener. There's a lot of free link shorteners out there to keep it so it's not going to read an enormous string of stuff to somebody using a screen reader. You can keep it nice and short for them as well. And other advice is to only share a link once on a page. So this really means the identical link. Don't link to the library and then say library 14 other times on your page and link to it every time. Because screen readers pull the links from the page and allow it to be a list separate from the content.

So think about whether or not your links could be pulled off your page and put in a list and the person would know where it's going. Like is it specific enough whatever text you put it over. Also, you don't want to have 14 times the library. You just want to have the library show up once in that list. So you can mention the library 14 times. Just point to wherever your link is. Say the link is in the resources below. The link is at first mentioned in the paragraph above.

That's a, you know, that's perfectly fine. It's better than repeating the link over and over on the page fast. Five, number three, Proper emphasis here. I have kind of consolidated a bunch of different things together. It includes. So you wouldn't find proper emphasis as a category if you went and looked that up in WCAG or webaim. Probably. It's not a specific guideline.

It is a. I'm, I'm mashing together a bunch of guidelines that basically come down to how you emphasize your text. And so I've combined some color items and some formatting items that are low hanging fruit fast to implement, easy to adopt as your course creation or editing process. So color, color requires a specific contrast. Color contrast only applies to text. It has nothing to do with images. If you have images that have different contrast. I mean, if you put text on the image and you want visual users to be able to read that text, you still want a decent color contrast on the image.

But what the rules apply to in WCAG are the text. So you want to have at least a four and a half to one contrast ratio on body text. You want to have at least a 3 to 1 on larger text. Now what is a color contrast ratio? Well, I nerded out about that a couple of years ago and I wrote it up in the Faculty Accessibility Center. If you want to go over there and you know that's your kind of, that's your kind of nerd, nerdy pastime and you want to go see what that's all about. I have written it up, but let's just suffice it to say that you don't need to do any color contrast math, right? You're not expected to figure out color contrast. There are color contrast checkers that will just tell you and in fact we have one built right into canvas in our city labs. Tools that can just show you if you meet it or you don't meet it and can help you adjust it if you don't meet it.

And in fact, I think all three accessibility tools will show you the color contrast when it's wrong and help you adjust it. It has to do with something with the luminosity of each color and its measurement and luminosity and like how, how much it reflects or not. And like you have to have a certain ratio in order for it to work. But basically you should use black or blackish text and light background wherever that is appropriate. If you do solid black and solid white, it can have a little bit of a, it's the highest contrast you can have. And so it can have a little bit of halo almost for some people. And so it's good to soften one of the colors, either the white or the black, in order to make it a little easier to read in all kinds of light circumstances. But generally using the default settings in our Canvas account is just fine for your text.

You don't want to be changing all your text and then no color alone for emphasis or meaning. So I've seen it where, you know, people try to use color coordination for different things. Maybe it's like parts of speech, for instance, where they're like, let's learn how to identify parts of speech. And then they make all the verbs purple and they make all the adjectives blue and they make all the nouns, you know, red or whatever. But somebody who doesn't have color sight cannot use that content. So there has to be a second method. It isn't that you cannot use the color, it's that you have to use the color and something in order to. So the, a good rule of thumb is if you could print it out in a non color printer, in a black and white printer, could you still tell the difference between the categories? There are ways that we can, we figured out ways to do this for all kinds of different complicated systems.

But often the best way is to use something like bold or using italic or using like icons or some kind of other element that will help that person differentiate the items visually without seeing the color. On formatting, I'm going to start at the bottom and just say avoid excessive formatting. Excessive formatting has the opposite effect. It does not emphasize, it just creates chaos on your page. Avoiding excessive formatting, meaning don't, don't apply too many things to the same theme page or you just make it hard to focus on what you're trying to emphasize. Save the emphasis for the thing that you really want to jump out. Avoid underlining, because in high contrast views, underlines mean links, so they aren't 100% A. No, no.

But use them very judiciously most of the time. If you could use some other form of emphasis, that would be better than using an underline. If it is not a link, go ahead and use the default font size that things come in. I've seen people who think, well, that canvas font, it's just too small. I'm going to make everything 14 point and I'm going to. And that's a lot of work to make everything custom sized. You know, you can make headings custom sized too. You can apply the heading style and then say, I don't want it to be 28, I'm going to make it 18 or I'm going to make it 42, whatever, I'm going to make it.

But if you do that for one, then visually, if you didn't do it for the rest of them, then they visually look different, but non visually look the same. So you're kind of creating a weird problem there by changing sizes and it could be a lot of work to customize those sizes. If you do want to do something custom, I would highly recommend City Labs for that too because it will let you template the heck out of that stuff instead of having to individually set it for all of these different items. But remember the tools I talked about before I wrote to Terry's question? We have tools that will make that bigger for them if they need that. We have tools that will change the background color for them. They can even change the font that's being used in order to make it more readable. So you don't need to decide how to do that in the default, just use the default and then let them know that the tools can help them do that if they need it. Right.

So that, that's a better approach. Also avoid caps. Avoiding using too many caps. Right. When you write a lot of words in all caps, it can look very yelly, but it's also harder for people with dyslexia to read all caps. It also can be interpreted by some screen readers as something that is, I need to read this out character by character because it's all caps. So it's like an acronym or something. So it's just going to treat it like it needs to read it out that way.

It isn't that you can't ever use caps, but just again, same with the underlining. There are better options than that. Don't overuse it, use it judiciously. Use it only where you really need it. If you could instead make it title case and make it bold and that accomplishes the same goal that you were using caps for. Then do that instead because it's more readable for everyone. Number four, images and graphics. So images, Again, each type of content has content rules.

For images and graphics, it is to have alternative text or alternate text. Text. It's sometimes referred to either way. First of all, if text is on images, that's not text, right? That's an image. It's an image of text. And if you have an image of text, then you need to put the text that's on the image in the alt text period needs to be there. If you have a lengthy text on an image, I really ask, why is it an image? It should be text. And there are a lot of ways for us to convert that and even format it.

Pretty cool inside canvas if you want it to look a certain way. But we can make it so it's text, so you don't need to write a whole paragraph of stuff for alt text. Alt text is really necessary when something is uniquely instructional. What makes it uniquely instructional? Well, first of all, you ask yourself, is it instructional or is it just something to be pretty on the page? Now, if your answer to it is instructional is yes, then is it uniquely instructional? So what would that mean? That means I didn't already say it in the text on the page. And that doesn't have to be verbatim. It could be paraphrased. But like, did you make the same exact point that the picture is making in the text? If it is redundant with things that you've already said, then it is not uniquely instructional. And it also does not require alt text.

You are always optionally welcome to put alt text on anything you want to put it on, but it doesn't require it. You can mark it as decorative if you prefer that. Now, alt text should focus on the visual instructional elements, obviously, because it's for the person who cannot see the visual characteristics. So whatever visual characteristics are important in that photo or that graphic are the things that you want to make sure you're calling out in your alt text. Alt text is supposed to be short. It's supposed to be like a Tweet. It's about 140, 150 characters in length, so it's not very much space to describe something. Now, don't say image of in your alt text.

Image of is unnecessary because the screen readers are really smart and they recognize the tags that say it's an image, and so they say image of. So if you say image of and they say image of, that means Every time an image comes up, they hear image of, image of. So it just sounds very redundant for them, right? It sounds like you might have a stutter. So you can leave that part off and save your characters for something more meaningful. Also, no file extensions, so you may not ever put those in. But the truth is, if you copy something and just paste it on a canvas page, it's almost always going to be in the alt text. Unless you edit it, it's going to say whatever the file name was. So as an alt text by default.

So it just plugs that in when you paste it onto the page. And you need to take that part off and make sure that the words have real space between them, not hyphens, not underscores. You know, if it consisted of words, make sure you, you're, you're making those back into words. And then for longer text, WebAIM has, has a great article and it's linked in the Faculty Accessibility Center. There's a whole thing in there about how to manage images that require longer text solutions. So I mean, the first way to manage something that requires a lengthier text explanation as a graphic, again, is to make sure it's redundant in your page somewhere for everybody. If you really want to treat it as a separate item that requires lengthier explanation, you can always add that explanation in an accordion on the page. You can create a separate page with the description and link it to the caption of that item or near that item and say here, if you need the, you know, the non visual explanation of this thing, click here.

You know, again, the link on the non visual explanation part, not on the click here part. Ultimately, at the end of the day, you got to have a human in the loop on this one. And not just any human, the human who decided to put it there and why it's there that's important for images. The last one, at least in our presentation today, is videos. And you might be surprised to see videos in something called fast because captions are not fast to make captions can be very tedious and. But they get better all the time. The machine captions have really, really improved and the tools that we have will make machine captions for you. So anything you put into Canva Studio is going to give you some captions and it actually has a pretty friendly editor to make minor fixes in those captions, like little things like making sure the capitalization right, making sure formal names are spelled correctly, adding commas and periods, adding audio description which is non word sounds that are relevant to the Video Captions must be 99% accurate.

That means one word in 100 can have an error and it can still pass accuracy levels. There are a few other suggestions that you can find in the Faculty Accessibility center about rules that captions should follow. Like they should be of a certain font size, they should only be two lines deep. They should be on the screen for a certain specific, within a specific range of time. But most people and most tools make sure that those things are already the case. So those aren't as much in need of you implementing it, just you knowing what it is and fixing it if it seems wrong. It's also good if you can. If you have multiple speakers to identify the people, even if it's Speaker 1 and Speaker 2, you don't know the people's names.

Just so the person who's listening or who can't listen but is watching through captions, knows when who the person changed who is speaking, which may or may not be evident from whatever you're watching on the screen. You may not know who is speaking because they may not be on screen at that very moment. So that can be another suggestion there. But the reason why it's in Fast five is because if it's easy through our tools to fix it, it really is fast. And if it's not fast, I tell you what is fast. Handing it into our free captioning service. Boom, done. They will do it.

They will send it back to you. It's usually under a week if it's a sort of standard type of job and you didn't like drop, you know, 42 different multiple hour videos on them or something. But if it's just a normal video, even if you just found that your captions weren't very correct and you wanted to correct it, but you don't, if you think it's going to take you more than a half an hour to fix what's there, you know, or make your own time cut off, you know, because it's a sunk cost thing where you're like, well, it just needs a few things. And then two hours later, still there. But now you've already done 30, you know, 75% of it. And you're like, I'm just going to finish it now that I'm already this far in. But like, if you realize, oh my gosh, this is tedious, it's going to take forever, the timing isn't right, Something's not right about it. It's not reading things right.

You literally can just send it over to our captioning service. The captioning service will show where that's listed. It's listed a bunch of places so you can find it. Now, I saw Christina ask, can you caption a video someone else created? Yes. So all YouTube videos can be pulled. YouTube and Vimeo videos can be added into Canva Studio and you can get accurate captions to run on top of those YouTube videos by doing that, no matter if you know the person you made that video or not. Because when you stream videos through a service, you are not making an actual copy. It's still the original that you're streaming.

You are not actually invoking anything related to copyright because it's not a copy, it's the original. You're just streaming different captions over the bottom of it that are accurate. There's been plenty of accessibility lawsuits that are multi million dollars. There's been zero lawsuits where somebody said they infringed on copyright because somebody made more accurate captions for their video. So you know, this is there. There's a definite upside to making sure your captions are accurate over worrying about the. Worrying about that. And even if you have, like, not that I want to encourage you to go and dig this up, but if you have some old VCR tape, if you have an old dvd, if you have like whatever the captioning and presentation services, those guys will work with you on what you need captioned and you can ask back from them.

An open caption video, which means the captions are burnt in. Or a closed caption file that you can then put on top of a video inside of a tool like Canvas Studio Play. Pause it. All the ones that we have, 3C Media. All of the ones we have, you can just add the captioning file. Video captions closes out our fast five.

Thank you for listening to the Mount San Antonio College Podcast brought to you by Mount sac's POD office and created in partnership with Avant Haüs Media. Original music created and edited by Nira Azira. Be sure to check out our growing library of over 230 episodes and let us know your thoughts. You can reach me, Chisa Uyeki at C U Y E K I at mountsac.edu Wishing you an amazing year and happy listening.