Panorama is an external tool integrated into Canvas that scans the course content you have added to your course site, and assigns it an “accessibility score," which instructors can use to assess and understand the level of accessibility their course materials have, as well as clear instructions for what needs to be done for the course material to become more accessible.
Panorama is integrated and enabled for all Canvas courses automatically. Instructors do not need to turn on or enable Panorama for their course or content.
Table of Contents
This article will address the following information:
Determining a File's Accessibility Score
Panorama generates an Accessibility Score for every file uploaded to a Canvas course site. Panorama does this by scanning the file, and determining if the elements responsible for making a document, image, or video accessible are present for people who use screen readers, are hearing impaired, or have other learning barriers.
Some of the things Panorama scans for and includes in its Accessibility Score include if:
- PDF documents have gone through OCR (Optical Character Recognition) so scanned images of documents are converted to digital text for screen readers to read
- PDF documents have appropriate headings and tags, which allows screen reader users to navigate easily among different sections of a document
- Documents have a language set
- Images have alternative-text (alt-text) so screen readers can provide users with meaningful information about the contents of an image
- Videos have captions
Accessibility Score Icons
Panorama will generate Accessibility Scores for DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX, PDF, HTML, TXT, GIF, XLS, XLSX, ODT, ODP, ODS, RTF file types, and editable HTML pages.
| Accessibility Score Color | Accessibility Score Shape | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Red | Octagon | Accessibility score less than or equal to 30% |
| Yellow | Triangle | Accessibility score between 30% and 70% |
| Green | Hexagon | Accessibility score greater than 70% |
| Blue | Circle | Student view to download an alternative format |
| Grey | Prohibition Sign | Document has disabled alternative formats |
Viewing a File's Accessibility Score
- Click into the "Files" section of your course from the Course Navigation.
- Every file in your "Files" section will have a colored icon in the "Accessibility" column.
- Click the accessibility icon for the file you want to see the Accessibility Score report for in more detail.
- The Panorama Accessibility Score report interface will open over the "Files" section. Here are the components of the report interface:
- File Preview
- Aggregate Accessibility Score
- View Issues with the file that provides information on what the issue means and how to resolve it
- How many issues there are in total
- Upload file box to re-upload a new, more accessible version of the file
There are multiple ways to remediate / fix accessibility issues with the tools Panorama provides.
In some instances, Panorama will walk you through the steps to fix a document or file. In other instances, you can download an “Alternative Format” available to you and re-upload them to your site. Check out Panorama's Accessing Alternative File Formats in Panorama resource for more details about finding and downloading alternative formats of files.
You can also check out Panorama's own vendor support on using their Remediation Engine, which can remediate certain document accessibility issues in Panorama and replace the document in Canvas without needing to download the original file and then re-upload a new file.
For more help with Panorama, please email [email protected].