Your Choices Affect Students

How formatting affects your students' ease of access

Use the Canvas Rich Content Editor to create Tags

Look below on the left-hand side ("Visual Student View"). This is how Canvas formats your text when you use the built-in tools in the Rich Content Editor. A student who is blind will use an assistive technology called a screen reader that will read aloud what is on the page. A screen reader is a computer program downloaded onto a computer.

On the right-hand side is what a screen reader will interpret. The yellow highlighted items are tags.

The <h3> tag represents Heading level 3, <ul> represents “unordered list,” and <li>represents “Line Item.” Notice that tags help the screen reader interpret the type of text. Is it a heading? Is this group of text a list? The screen reader needs these tags to help the student understand how your text is formatted.

Visual student view

Screen reader view

Here's a heading.

Here's a paragraph.

Here's a bullet list:

Course design
Course development

<h3>Here's a heading.</h3>

<p>Here's a paragraph.</p>

<p>Here's a bulleted list:</p>

<ul>

<li>Course design</li>

<li>Course development </li>