Panorama provides several ways to find and address accessibility issues in Canvas. In addition to opening individual Accessibility Reports or working from the Course Report, you can enable an Accessibility Score banner on your Canvas course homepage.
The banner gives instructors quick access to the course Accessibility Score and a Launch Remediation tool that lets you move through course content that Panorama has identified for review.
Important: The Accessibility Score banner is visible to instructors only. Students will not see it.
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Text Directions
Turn On the Accessibility Score Banner
First, make sure Panorama is available in your Canvas course navigation.
- Go to Course Settings.
- Select the Navigation tab.
- Find Panorama.
- Enable it if needed.
- Save your changes.
Next, select Panorama from the course navigation to open the Course Report.
From the Course Report:
- Open Configuration.
- Select General Settings.
- Scroll to Show Accessibility Score on Homepage.
- Enable the setting.
- Scroll back to the top and save your changes.
Panorama notes that it may take up to five minutes for the change to appear.
Return to your Canvas course homepage. The Accessibility Score banner should now appear. If your course displays announcements on the homepage, the banner may appear below them.
Use Launch Remediation
The banner displays your current course Accessibility Score along with a Launch Remediation button.
Select Launch Remediation to open an Accessibility Report for an item in your course.
At the top of the report, you will see a numerical tracker indicating where you are within the items available for review. In my testing, these items appear to be organized from lower accessibility scores toward higher scores.
This gives you another way to systematically work through accessibility concerns without locating each item individually in Canvas.
Use the Tool to Spot Duplicate Files
Launch Remediation can also help surface duplicate content.
Select the toolbar displaying the name of the current item. Panorama will display a list of course content along with a search field.
Begin typing part of a file name, and the list will automatically filter. If multiple copies of the same or similarly named file appear, you may have duplicate files in your course.
For more information about locating and removing old or duplicate files, see The Secret Life of Canvas Files.
Remediate the Item
The Accessibility Report works the same way here as it does when opened from a Panorama icon or from the Course Report.
How you remediate the issue depends on the type of content.
Canvas Content
Canvas pages, assignments, quizzes, and other Canvas web content may appear as HTML files in Panorama.
For some issues, such as missing or inappropriate alternative text, you may be able to make the correction directly within the Accessibility Report. Select the suggested fix, make the necessary change, and apply the fix to the item.
Documents
For files such as:
- PDFs
- Word documents
- PowerPoint presentations
- Excel spreadsheets
Panorama can help identify accessibility concerns, but detailed remediation will often need to happen in the file’s native application.
The general workflow is:
- Download the source file from Panorama.
- Open it in the appropriate application.
- Remediate the accessibility issues.
- Upload the corrected version through Fix This Document.
- Review the updated Accessibility Report.
- Repeat the process as needed.
Remember that the Accessibility Score is a useful way to prioritize what to investigate, but improving the number is not the ultimate goal. The important question is whether students can meaningfully access and use the course content.
What If the Score Does Not Update?
After you apply a fix, Panorama will normally update the item and may display a brief celebration message.
Occasionally, however, the Accessibility Report may not immediately reflect the change.
If that happens, open Version History at the top of the report. Version History can help you verify whether Panorama actually created an updated version of the item.
If the corrected version is there but the current report has not updated, try leaving the report and reopening it.
This is especially helpful when you know you applied a fix but the Accessibility Score appears unchanged.
Apply the Setting to Multiple Courses
You do not need to configure the Accessibility Score banner separately in every course.
Return to:
Panorama → Configuration → General Settings
Then select Publish Settings.
Panorama will display the courses in which you are an instructor. Select the courses where you want to use the same Panorama configuration and choose Publish to Courses.
This can be particularly useful when preparing multiple courses for an upcoming semester or when you want the same remediation workflow available in both active courses and development shells.
Just remember that publishing the settings applies the configuration choices you have made—not only the homepage banner—to the courses you select.
Another Way Into Your Accessibility Work
The Accessibility Score banner does not replace Panorama’s individual Accessibility Reports or Course Report. Instead, it gives you another convenient entry point.
By placing Launch Remediation directly on the Canvas homepage, Panorama makes it easier to move from identifying accessibility concerns to actually working through them—one item at a time.
