Canvas Accessibility Testing & Evaluation (CATE)

Accessibility is most often an ongoing goal rather than an unambiguously quantifiable state. Answering the question “is this product accessible?” is frequently affected by factors within a vendor’s control. However, it may also be dependent on users’ choices of assistive technologies, browsers, and operating systems, as well as less tangible factors such as user sophistication and assumptions.
One universal tendency is that accessibility tends to grow best in environments that share knowledge and promote cooperation among vendors and users. Towards this end, several members of the Access Technology Higher Education Network (ATHEN) recently conducted an objective accessibility testing & evaluation of Canvas from November 2015 to January 2016. Following a similar process to the LMS Accessibility Evaluation projects, the ATHEN group published the results at the CSUN 2016 conference.
We have presented a high-level overview of the results of our new evaluation and provided recommendations for design, interaction, and coding practices whenever possible. Implementation of these suggestions should improve the overall usability/accessibility of Canvas Instructure for all users including those with disabilities.
Instructure, the developer of Canvas, has consistently demonstrated a commitment towards delivering an accessible product, and we look forward to continued collaboration for mutual benefit.
To learn more about the results, please visit and study the following documents:

1. Canvas Accessibility Testing & Evaluation CSUN 2016 (PowerPoint file)
2. Canvas Accessibility Testing & Evaluation Report (full report HTML file)
3. Canvas Accessibility Testing & Evaluation Results (Excel file)

To utilize the full feature of interlinking between different sheets in this document, you should open the file in Microsoft Excel program and not in the browser.