Mission: Accessible Continues to Build Momentum

The Canvas Accessibility Project (CAP), propelled by the Mission: Accessible challenge, continues to make significant progress toward ensuring all Northwestern digital learning materials are accessible for all students and comply with the University's digital accessibility policy. Now entering its third year, the project has quickened momentum. Through Mission: Accessible, instructors remediated 175 course sites across all schools and have helped reduce accessibility errors in Northwestern Canvas by 48 percent as of the end of Spring Quarter 2024.

The project was launched through a partnership between Northwestern IT, AccessibleNU, and the Office of Civil Rights and Title IX Compliance, and partnerships remain the driving factor in its success. The project leaders' two-pronged strategy for providing direct support to faculty and instructors is proving tremendously successful. Beyond collaboration between the project conveners, Northwestern IT’s Teaching and Learning Technologies (TLT) team is now focused on partnerships with individual schools and providing built-in, automated support in Canvas that guides those with “teacher” access through correcting errors and real-time document conversion options for students.

Partnering with Schools

The Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications was the first to partner with TLT and commit to school-wide digital accessibility. Under the coordinated leadership of Dean Charles Whitaker and associate deans Beth Bennett and Vijay Viswanathan, Medill instructors worked with TLT to achieve zero accessibility errors in all Medill Canvas Course sites.

“Even before we learned of the Canvas Accessibility Project, members of the Medill faculty—with the guidance and assistance of our Learning Engineer Lead, Reginald Jackson, and our Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Rob Brown—were consistently working on ways to make their course materials more user-friendly for students with a variety of needs,” said Dean Whitaker. “So, it was a relatively easy decision for the Medill leadership to sign on to school-wide participation in this pilot program. We are extraordinarily proud of the enthusiasm and commitment that our faculty brought to the initiative.”

TLT built off the success with Medill, partnering with the Communication Sciences and Disorders program in the School of Communication to reduce their Spring 2024 Canvas accessibility errors to zero as well. TLT has plans to work with the Pritzker School of Law, the Radio/Television/Film and the Theatre departments in the School of Communication, and the Math and History departments in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences during the 2024–25 academic year.

In addition to the effort to get so many courses to zero errors, TLT’s two new accessible document specialists, Christine Colwell and Rigel Anthis, offer direct support for making course documents accessible. Christine and Rigel have remediated all documents for over 20 classes, which combined with the work on the Canvas content, has made those courses fully accessible.

Both Chelsea Watson, Weinberg College Department of Chemistry Program Coordinator, and James Ward, School of Education and Social Policy Master in Learning and Organizational Change Senior Program Coordinator, have led efforts to correct accessibility errors in Canvas courses for their entire departments. Review the Mission: Accessible Wall of Fame on the Northwestern Accessibility website for a full list of courses that have completed the challenge. Courses meeting all accessibility guidelines are also listed on the Explore Accessible Courses page of the AccessibleNU website to help students identify them.

Automated Support Tools

The Pope Tech Accessibility Guide, found on any editable course page in Canvas, has been an invaluable asset in helping instructors quickly identify and correct accessibility errors. With only a few clicks, the Pope Tech tool performs automated corrections to improve digital accessibility on course sites. The tool can review any existing content or new edits to Canvas content.

This spring, TLT also introduced SensusAccess, another powerful tool to enhance digital accessibility, into Canvas. SensusAccess is an online document conversion system that converts text and image-based files into more accessible formats. It can transform text and image-based files into different outputs, including audio, Braille, or e-text formats. An icon next to all uploaded documents in Canvas will allow immediate use of SensusAccess. All students, faculty, and staff can learn more about and use the tool outside of Canvas by visiting the SensusAccess page on the Accessibility website.

Continuing Improvement

Ensuring digital accessibility is an ongoing effort necessary for Northwestern to continue providing all students with the highest education standards and equitable access to learning materials. Teaching and Learning Technologies plans to continue targeted partnerships across the University, allowing tailored support to schools and units ready to meet the Mission: Accessible challenge. If a school or department is interested in working with TLT to address accessibility issues in Canvas sites, contact canvas@northwestern.edu.

Every Northwestern community member can learn more about digital accessibility and find training resources on the Accessibility website. Stellar progress in correcting accessibility issues is not only achieved when an entire school dedicates time; committed individuals also have a huge impact on moving the work forward.