An accessibility rant courtesy of my Faculty Focus email
So who doesn’t want a syllabus that students will actually read and use throughout the semester? I think most professors — whether creative or not-so-creative, or those who see themselves primarily as teachers and those who don’t — hate to get the questions that are already answered in the syllabus. So some of us try to make our syllabi more student-friendly and enticing to read. One page of my syllabus even has the heading: “Now for the part of the syllabus that nobody reads, but you really should! (because if you really want to know how I approach this class, here it is…)”
And I’ll be honest. I don’t have many design cells in my body – I’m not wired that way. Practical, simple to follow — that’s more my speed. My websites don’t have flashy details. I wish I had a bit more artistic talent, but that’s not me.
But enough with the preamble – what got me out of my lack of updates to this website was the article entitled “What a Cool Syllabus…But is It Accessible?” on Magna Publication’s Faculty Focus website. I’ll have to admit that organizing the syllabus around Pokemon is clever, and may certainly help people get into accounting and students into the syllabus. And the author’s students do seem to be appreciative of the efforts.
Where I take issue with the article is her description of the PDF version of her syllabus, which based on the article, has “medium accessibility.” I think she’s being too kind here. While Canva itself can be a helpful design tool, and the Canva team has worked on making their website more accessible, the PDF’s it generates aren’t very accessible. Chad Chilies and Dax Castro, two fellow Accessible Document Specialists who have forgotten more than some of us even know, highlighted the problems well on the Accessibility Unraveled website and Chax Chat Podcast (a great podcast for those interested in accessibility issues, particularly with InDesign). They spent most of one of their episodes talking about their discussions with Canva and what needs to happen to make their PDF’s more accessible.
There are some guidelines that will help, but won’t get someone all the way to an accessible PDF:
- In Canva, use the PDF Standard, not the PDF print option when generating the PDF.
- Always check the reading order — this is one of the biggest issues when it comes to PDF files in general. Make sure that the page reads in the order that you intend for it to be read.
- Canva allows you to make bad color choices with poor contrast. Make sure to check the color contrast using a proper contrast checker.
- Know that it’ll take some time to remediate the PDF in Acrobat Pro.
I should also point out that the problem she used in the article was a PNG with no alt text, and neither of the syllabus fragments had alt text either. š¤¦