As I have mentioned before, I love Canva. I use it for all my presentations and for other kinds of documents as well. It is very easy to use and they keep adding new features to it. Another benefit is that it offers a bazillion (that’s a legit unit) templates and elements that you can use to make your presentations not look like you-know-what-other-app. It also offers a lot of export options, such as PowerPoint, and yes, PDF. My favorite option, though, is to just use them live HTML embed code, which I plug into an HTML block in Ultra. The “live” part means that when I update the file in Canva, it gets automatically updated in Ultra. But I also attach a PDF and that needs to be accessible. By default, it’s not.
And, in case you forgot, the College has an institutional license for Canva. Might as well use it.
This is the original Ally score for one of the regular files I use in my face-to-face class:
Before going any further, I should not that Canva PDFs are tagged by default, so you don’t have to worry about that. Just don’t check the “flatten PDF” option before exporting.
However, the main issue here is that all the different aesthetic elements in Canva presentations are “read” by Ally as images, and they usually don’t come with descriptions. that is the main issue here.
Fortunately, Canva has greatly improved their accessibility options, so, let’s do some fixes over there. You will find the accessibility options under File -> Accessibility:
You’ll want to click on the first item, “Check design accessibility”, which will open a panel letting you know what issues your design has:
I do not have 110 images in that presentation. However, all the design elements are what’s causing this. The nice part is that none of these images require descriptions, they are decorative.
For one image, it’s a quick fix:
But good grief, I do NOT want to do things 110 times. Luckily, I don’t have to. I can batch edit that.
All I need to do is check all the images that are decorative and mark them all as decorative in one go. That took me a couple of minutes.
But there are actually a couple of images that do require description (as you can see above. It’s also easy to do:
Having done all that, I get a check mark from Canva:
Another quick fix you can use in Canva has to do with the structure of your document. Ally will ding you if you do not use a style sheet or if you do not start everything at level 1. You can also fix that in Canva by navigating to the “Edit Text Semantics” option. There, you will be able to re-tag your text elements based on the options Canva offers:
It might look like this:
Now, I have not done it for my whole document so Ally might ding me for it. It’s better to take care of this as you create your documents, rather than having to redo it after the facts.
Nevertheless, let’s see what Ally says now:
Yeah, much better,
And yes, I still have the expected issues, but for the most part, my PDF is accessible. Happy dance.
This was all about 5 to 10 minutes of work.
