Canva: Updated Accessibility Features

Online marketing tools like Canva have become increasingly popular among campus communicators to quickly and easily generate a variety of communication assets such as social media graphics, slide decks, videos, social posts, and PDFs. Canva can help produce branding consistency and promote team sharing of designs, content, or templates more easily.

As an added enhancement, Canva has started to introduce some built-in features to improve the accessibility of its documents, videos, and social posts—something that’s incredibly important with a new Americans with Disabilities Act rule.

Some of the new Canva accessibility features for PDFs include:

• Alerts to add alt text to your images, graphics, and icons
• Color contrast check on all elements of your project
• Simple reading order and headings tagging to generate assistive technology-friendly PDFs. “Simple” means no more than one heading and one subhead with minimal graphics.

Additional accessibility features include the ability to:

• Turn animations and transitions on and off or reduce motion settings
• Customize your design experience with keyboard shortcuts, light and dark modes, and options for color contrast
• Create simple captions of spoken-word video and audio content
• Enable native language and include translations of your content in other languages

Using the Accessibility Checker in Canva

Canva’s accessibility checker is best for simple designs. Using it is easy. Under the top menu title ‘File’, choose ‘Accessibility’ and toggle to ‘Check Design Accessibility’. The Canva Accessibility Check will appear and will look at three main areas: typography size, contrast, and alternative text.

To optimize accessibility when designing in Canva:

• Keep designs simple.
• Heading sizes should follow sequential order using the same font size for each style.
• Body copy should be at least 3/16 inch (4.8 mm) high based on the uppercase letter “I”, which is roughly 12 points for print and 16 points for digital sans-serif fonts.
• Use the ‘Position’ tool to arrange layers so the content you want screen readers to read first is the bottom layer. This layer arrangement applies to both graphic elements and text.

These new accessibility additions to Canva are a great start, but Canva is not yet capable of producing a fully accessible PDF document per WCAG 2.2 standards. You can view more about Canva’s accessibility updates and current limitations online. If you need to create a complex project, (slide decks, brochures, etc) consider using InDesign, Powerpoint, or Word, which have more robust accessibility features.

Helpful Accessibility Resources and Tips

• Reference the University’s Office of Digital Accessibility’s 7 Core Accessibility Skills when generating your Canva content, with the understanding that you may have to use additional tools to create fully compliant PDFs.
• To check your contrast outside of any platform, the WebAim Contrast Checker is a good tool.
• To understand diverse audience needs, lean on the user stories and recommendations of WCAG’s Content Usable to produce content that is perceivable, operable, useful, and robust. Just remember POUR, and you will set yourself up for better success in creating and sharing accessible content and PDFs.