The best practices for designing online courses are to make them simple, yet effective. It can be tempting to add several different colours, font sizes, and images, but consider whether or not this kind of content is achieving the learning objectives of the course or if it is simply filler.

It is best to provide good color contrast. Black text on a white or light background is the most readable. In addition, patterns and images behind text make it more difficult to read. Futhermore, color should not be the only differentiator. Consider the use of text size, placement, and styles like bold or italics to illustrate differences. Most importantly, Canvas has a stylesheet connected to all pages and you should NOT change fonts or colours in texts or headings. USE the pre-formatted headings provided to create content structure in your course.

Canvas pages and not PDF-filer

As a teacher you need to consider that documents in formats such as Word and pdf are accessible, and that the logic in your course rooms are accessible to those who need to rely on screen readers and speech synthesis.

Accessible documents
Accessible structure

It can be tempting to scan a document or create a pdf-file for your assignment but this could mean that the document is no longer accessible. It is always preferable to create an html-canvas page rather than publishing PDF files. Ask yourself the following questions:

Do I really need a scanned document for this?
Is it accessible?
Is there an alternative?
Can I just create a Canvas page?
What does it look like in the app?

This video from Helen Graves will give you some inspiration for this section: (2:31 minuter) Pages vs PDFs from the series Byte-sized Canvas med Helen Graves, Professional development for California community college faculty

Use accessible headings in Canvas

When creating content use headings. So, what’s a heading? Headings break-up the text into chunks, making it easier for all to digest the information.

Use bullet lists to create a visual structure.

removes formatting from your text if you have pasted it in from Word. This will revert the text to the stylesheet in Canvas.

Denna guide ger dig instruktioner för hur du skapar tillgängliga rubriker.(in Swedish)

Tips! Unsure if your page is accessible then test with talsyntesen i Canvas. Use the accessibility checker in Canvas.