Your Website Might Pass WCAG, but Will Your Canvas Courses?

Higher education has made significant progress in digital accessibility, from website governance to support of WCAG standards to a general investment in more accessibility experiences for all.

Those efforts represent meaningful progress toward ADA Title II compliance. But they only address part of the challenge. 

For most institutions, the next phase of accessibility work lies inside their LMS. Unlike websites, LMS are continuously evolving, shaped by daily content contributions from faculty across departments. As institutions prepare for ADA Title II compliance, they are realizing that web accessibility and LMS accessibility require fundamentally different operational strategies.

Why Canvas Is Its Own Challenge

Institutional websites typically benefit from centralized governance. Dedicated web teams manage publishing standards, templates, and accessibility reviews through structured workflows.

Canvas is the most widely used -- and heavily adopted -- LMSs in higher education. While technically a centralized system, Canvas operates differently as each instructor owns their course sites. Every day, they upload new PDFs, PowerPoints, Word documents, videos, scanned readings, quizzes, and other instructional materials. Some of these materials they create themselves. Some they’ve found online. Historically, most institutions have encouraged (or required) faculty to be responsible for accessibility of these materials. All of this makes it difficult to manage accessibility across departments.

The result is a constantly changing environment with limited centralized oversight.

Under ADA Title II, institutions aren’t just responsible for public-facing web sites. They must also ensure that the instructional content students rely on every day meets accessibility standards—no matter where it came from—even as that content continues to evolve.

First Step: Visibility

Before an institution can remediate inaccessible content, it must first understand what content exists. That might sound straightforward, but for many colleges and universities, it is one of the biggest operational hurdles. 

Accessibility teams often cannot answer questions like:

• How many files exist across Canvas and what types of files are they?
• Which materials are student-facing?
• Where are the highest-risk accessibility issues?
• Where should remediation efforts begin?

Because ADA Title II extends beyond webpages to include instructional materials, institutions need a reliable way to understand what exists across their LMS before they prioritize remediation. Without that visibility, it becomes difficult to assess institutional risk, allocate resources, or measure progress.

Visibility changes accessibility from an unstructured cleanup effort into an operational process grounded in prioritization and control.

From Audits to Operations

Historically, accessibility initiatives follow the same pattern: audit, remediate, repeat. While that model works well for websites, Canvas has a different reality.

Canvas materials are stored in distinct, faculty-owned courses—not a central repository. Canvas offers an API that allows programmatic access to these courses, but that requires a significant technical lift. And it still demands an understanding of which files, pages, or tools in each course are actively used and need to be assessed. 

It’s no wonder most institutions leave accessibility remediation to faculty.

Even if a team is able to access all Canvas courses, audit the files, pages, and tools, and discern which are likely to be used, that process is based on a snapshot. Instruction is not frozen in time, so by the time a Canvas audit is complete, faculty have uploaded new course materials, revised assignments, replaced readings, and created entirely new courses. 

And so the cycle continues. Once an inventory is complete, materials must be remediated. This is typically done manually—course by course, resource by resource. Some tools, including Canvas’s built-in a11y checker, can help here, but typically only with HTML-based resources, like LMS-native tools and pages. Uploaded files, like PPTX, DOCX, and the notoriously inaccessible PDF must be downloaded, evaluated, remediated, and then re-uploaded to the course, replacing the original or requiring a new link in the LMS (complete with any conditions) back in the right place.

Of course, even if the audited material is then evaluated and remediated, the central team must keep track of if and how that happened for each and every resource. Because when the team audits again to track all the new materials, they need to know what to focus on, as well as what has already been dealt with.

Institutions that are staying ahead of the curve are moving beyond periodic remediation and into continuous accessibility operations. That shift in thinking represents one of the biggest changes in higher education accessibility strategy—and it’s a shift colleges and universities must make to remain compliant.

What Sustainable Accessibility Operations Look Like

Building sustainable accessibility operations requires institutions to establish repeatable systems that make the task manageable over time. Those systems often include:

• Continuous inventorying of Canvas content
• Centralized visibility into accessibility issues
• Risk-based prioritization of remediation efforts
• Faculty guidance and instructional support
• Monitoring newly uploaded content
• Reporting that tracks progress over time

An effective accessibility program must also establish clear governance around who will own accessibility, how faculty will be supported, and how progress will be measured. This operational model allows institutions to move beyond reactive remediation and toward continuous compliance. 

Even though there is a clear due date established via ADA Title II, accessibility projects must be treated as the new form of everyday operations, rather than a project with a finish line. 

How AI Supports Accessibility at Scale

Building successful operations across Canvas requires the ability to manage thousands of courses and rapidly changing instructional content. Manual processes alone make it difficult for colleges and universities to maintain consistent visibility and prioritize remediation effectively. 

AI-assisted accessibility platforms like AristAI help shift reactive remediation to structured operational workflows. 

What changes with AI-assisted accessibility operations:

This shift allows accessibility teams to focus less on locating problems and more on resolving them. The result is a more sustainable operational model that aligns with the ongoing nature of course creation inside Canvas.

The Takeaway

When it comes to the LMS, digital accessibility compliance cannot rely on periodic audits or manual remediation alone. Institutions need visibility into all the resources that reside in their LMS (even as that continuously changes), plus structured workflows to manage remediation, and systems that support accessibility as digital content use evolves.

The institutions best positioned for long-term success will be those that set high standards and build the operational capacity to sustain accessibility compliance over time. 

Want to see how fast AristAI can process ALL documents and resources across your Canvas courses? Request a demo and we'll show you live.

Sources:

Fact Sheet: New Rule on the Accessibility of Web Content and Mobile Apps Provided by State and Local Governments | ADA.gov

Federal Register :: Extension of Compliance Dates for Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability; Accessibility of Web Information and Services of State and Local Government Entities | National Archives

Meeting Accessibility Requirements in Your Canvas Course (Instructors) | UC San Diego

The Case for Embedded Digital Accessibility | EDUCAUSE