Software Can’t Check Everything – Or Can It?
Accessibility testing tools like the Course Accessibility Report are an essential part of our preparations for the changes to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) coming up in April 2027. CSUN provides all kinds of tools to check for accessibility. We encourage you to run these as you work!
- Canvas Course Accessibility Report
- WAVE toolbar for web pages and applications (plus more tools and extensions for web evaluations).
- Check Accessibility in Microsoft Office
- Check for accessibility in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC
Realistically, though, automated software checkers find between a third and half of accessibility barriers. To ensure that a document or Canvas Page is truly accessible to students, review by a person is necessary too.
The Universal Design Center (UDC) introduced guides to support you in reviewing your content for items the checkers might miss. Our Course Accessibility Checklist outlines important criteria to check, with links to additional resources.
Our 8-question Basic Accessibility Evaluation is written to help you efficiently identify the most common accessibility issues that checkers don’t include. These eight items are:
- Readability
- Searchable text
- Title (the door to your content)
- Link text descriptions
- Color
- Zooming or magnifying
- Navigating without a mouse (keyboard navigation)
- Video captions
Evaluating these eight questions has been a manual process – until now. CSUN’s ChatGPT Edu bridges the gap between traditional checkers and human review, automating most of the steps for web pages and files.
Introducing the Basic Accessibility Evaluation! A custom CSUN ChatGPT tool, you can share webpages or upload files to the Basic Accessibility Evaluation and it will run additional checks to supplement the various checkers. Please note that you must be signed into ChatGPT with your CSUN credentials to access the Basic Accessibility Evaluation. For help with logging in, visit the CSUN ChatGPT page.
Built within the CSU’s ChatGPT instance, it comes with all the safety, privacy, and other protections that the CSU ensured are applied to our instance.