Course Accessibility Checker | Product Overview

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Release Timing: Generally Available (GA) on February 21, 2026 as a Feature Option and enabled-by-default. Can be disabled by account admin.
Regional Availability: Globally Supported
Customer Type: All Customers
Available with: Canvas

Key Takeaway: The Course Accessibility Checker is a course-level tool that enables instructors to identify, remediate, and validate accessibility issues across Canvas-created content. It streamlines accessibility compliance with live, on-demand reports, built-in remediation guidance, and content previews.

While the existing RCE Accessibility Checker has been a trusted and widely used tool for years, evolving accessibility standards and impending legislative changes mean educators and administrators need more. Accessibility remains a top priority for our customers, and the new Course Accessibility Checker is designed to meet those growing demands by providing:

Accessibility checking and remediation: Offers instructors and administrators an easier way to ensure course materials meet WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility requirements across web and mobile, including content in Canvas.
Education for ongoing instruction: Not only flags accessibility issues, but explains what each rule means, why it matters, and how to resolve it, helping teams build accessibility knowledge as they go.
Remediates commonly missed accessibility issues: Designed to address the most common course-level accessibility workflows.

How to Enable: “Accessibility Checker” Feature Option

Enabled by default, admins can opt out.

Video Walkthrough: Coming Soon

Resources:

Release Notes

Blog Post

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Comments

sbj

Will this new accessibility checker replace the RCE Accessibility Checker or is it in addition?

JACOBSEN_C

It would be great to have the ability as an Admin to provide instructors with the choice… of adding the option to the course navigation column - when enabling the feature at the account level. So… off, on, or on with the instructor choice to enable in the course navigation column or not.

annalindsay

Hi sbj! This tooling is an addition to the existing RCE checker. The existing two options are:

RCE checker - scan + remediate within the learning resource
Course A11y checker - scan + remediate on course level (across learning resources)

annalindsay

@JACOBSEN_C

Hi there! The Course Accessibility Checker appears in the course navigation for educators within a course, not for students. If it does not appear in the navigation, instructors would not have a way to access or use the tool within that course.

If you're looking for an experience that gives instructors more control, I’d recommend setting the default status to disabled and unlocked. This allows instructors to enable the tool only in the courses where they want to use it. Once enabled, educators can also choose where it appears in their course navigation based on their preferences.

I hope this helps! Please let me know if you need any additional clarification.

JACOBSEN_C

Hi Anna,

Thank you for the reply. The big picture is this will add confusion for instructors. Ally, Yuja, UDoIt, and I imagine more vendors providing help with accessibility in Canvas course shells each have a course navigation column placement. As 3rd party services, they are limited to what is available to them in the LTI spec. (API, different story I'm sure.). Instructure, on the other hand, has a lot more real estate in in course shells to work with to place access to this/their accessibility tool. Ultimately, it'll confuse instructors who are already less than excited about shoring up their material to be digitally accessibile, and I imagine considering another approach could help everyone with a stake in the issue. (As an admin and support here at my school, I am totally aiming to line up all accessibility tools with course nav. placements to contrast and compare. It makes things super easy - and probably fun! But, then, I'm also not teaching in a limited amount of weeks Calculus, Art history from Renaissance to the Modern World, or Structural Geology to distracted 19yr olds.)

sbj

I agree. It's not that I think this accessibility checker is not a good thing — it is. But it's a little late in the game. Most institutions at this point are using some third-party tool (we're using Ally) and my first thought when I saw the screenshots was that this looks too similar to Ally and will confuse my faculty. I'm glad that we have some options for enabling or not. I like the idea of having it unlocked so faculty can choose to enable it if they want.

I was hoping that, rather than a new accessibility checker, we would be getting news soon about automatic captioning for Canvas media player. I think that's where Instructure could be really helpful to its customers — we're trying to educate our faculty about accessibility standards, which include captioning of all videos, but there's no automatic generated captions in the Canvas player. I know that's been on the roadmap for a while and I know it has challenges. But that's my wish list. :-)

JACOBSEN_C

(A couple years ago we had to meet a couple guys/developers in Budapest over Zoom to make a case for auto-captioning to trigger and publish automatically in Canvas Studio. It worked out in the end, and if you see settings/toggles in Studio now I think they may be in the wake of the discussions. They appeared afterwards, anyway.)

Akos Farago

@sbj thank you for the feedback, we are actively working on an automated captioning solution for Canvas media which will also support editing the transcript and searching in it directly at the course content.

We are giving early access to some customers very soon, so if you are interested I'll reach out to you directly so you can see exactly what's coming!

Akos Farago

@JACOBSEN_C that is a great feedback and fully understandable in light of other existing accessibility checker tools leveraging the same placement. We’ll definitely be on the lookout for how often this comes up. Where do you see a better placing in the course shells for this specific solution?

JACOBSEN_C

Hi @Akos Farago

I imagine in the RCE you all will leave the accessibility checker where it is already - for individual assignment, pages, announcements, etc. For access to the/a larger dashboard to the course accessibility as a whole, I imagine a button adjacent (above, below, or within) the column of buttons in the right sidebar of the homepage. Consider changing the button colour to draw the eye, and maybe add a simple, unique icon after the button text for the same reason.

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Screenshot 2026-01-27 at 11.06.23 AM.png

sbj

I am definitely interested, thank you!

lbeach

Thanks for voicing this, SBJ. We are Yuja Panorama users and will need to do a deep dive/comparison of the tools. I'm a little frustrated that the tool will be on by default since so many of us have voiced our preference that new tools be "opt in" rather than "opt out" in order to reduce the chance that something gets deployed before it can be vetted, communicated, documented, etc. by the college. We will be on the lookout for this new tool and try to head it off before it becomes visible to faculty to avoid confusion.

TerriGustafson

Thank you! We are a small school, and the third-party solutions have been out of our budgetary reach. This will help with our ADA progress and efforts.

mhincman_1929

Will this new tool also check PDFs that are uploaded into Canvas?

dbrace

Hi @mhincman_1929,

I would recommend that you take a look at the post below from earlier today.

https://community.instructure.com/en/discussion/664751/our-commitment-on-course-accessibility-improved-tooling-coming-soon

This is something that @Akos Farago mentions.

-Doug

tennymaria

Thanks for providing this! While it will be another tool to learn, I am excited to see how an integrated tool will benefit users. We would love to be included in the early access, if possible. We are in the middle of training our teachers to be ready for the Title II date in April and would benefit from including this in our training instead of afterward.

annalindsay

Thanks @dbrace for calling attention to that blog post! @mhincman_1929 your question as well as a few other FAQs are addressed there. :)