What challenges do you face while making learning accessible? 📚✨

[KristinL]

Ensuring courses are accessible to all learners is essential, but that mindset comes with challenges.

What are the biggest obstacles you or your organization faces in making learning truly inclusive? How do you navigate accessibility concerns, and what strategies have helped you create more equitable learning experiences?

Share your insights—we’d love to hear from you! 💬

[ryan_corris]

One of the biggest obstacles in making learning truly inclusive is ensuring that all video content is captioned accurately and efficiently. I love that Canvas Studio generates captions quickly and allows for easy editing to improve accuracy. However, a challenge arises when videos are created outside of Studio, as not all platforms support caption integration in the same seamless way.

For instance, while it’s possible to download both the media file and transcript from Studio, platforms like Google Drive don’t always support attaching a transcript file directly to a video for playback. This creates an extra step in ensuring accessibility, as captions may need to be manually embedded or hosted elsewhere.

Accessibility should be integrated into the content creation workflow from the start, ensuring a realistic timeline that includes all necessary elements. A proactive approach makes accessibility a standard part of course design, not an afterthought.

[DeyonteProby1]

My biggest concern to me while trying to be a useful member for the community is to learn what I am actually doing. I do not have any clue if I am here to create my own rubric,syllabuses, or schedules. Or if I would be assigned to anything. Right now I am not strategic instructor. But I am great at adapting to new experiences. 

[ProfessorBeyrer]

An accessibility challenge in my organization is helping instructional faculty move away from using PDF files and switching to using webpage-like places to host content, like Content Pages or Google Docs. Those are much easier to make accessible than PDF files. In our training we encourage colleagues to use webpages, which have the added bonus of being easily updated without having to send a new version of a file to all of our students.

[victoria-maloy]

100% agree.  We have so many PDFs that are not accessible in our Canvas instance, and our instructors don't have the time, knowledge, or resources to remediate them.