Three R’s Review Strategy

Retire, Replace, Remediate

New federal regulations require our websites and online content to be accessible by April 26, 2027. Our main goal is making sure everything we create going forward meets accessibility standards. This includes Canvas pages, documents, presentations, videos, course materials, and all other digital content.
We also need to review content that already exists. This might seem a daunting task, but here we offer a straightforward approach. The Three R’s Strategy: Retire, Replace, Remediate. This method helps us tackle existing content in a focused, step-by-step way.

Act Now To Make Your Digital Content Accessible

Follow the Three R’s Review Strategy to take immediate action on making your digital course content accessible.

STEP 1: Retire

Review content to determine if it is still relevant and necessary to achieve course outcomes. If it isn’t relevant, remove or archive what is no longer needed.

  • After you have copied your course to a new term, that is a great time to review your content. Do the files, pages, and links still meet course goals? Are you still using each assignment? If you have items you are not going to use, delete them so you do not need to review them for accessibility.

TIP: Use TidyUP (available in your course navigation) to identify unused files and unpublished content that may no longer be needed in your course.

STEP 2: Replace

Review the content that made it past the “Retire” stage and assess it for accessibility. If the content is not accessible, determine if it can be replaced with a more accessible version or format. Here are three tips:

  • Replace PDFs with an accessible link from the publisher, a website, or a library resource.
  • Convert PDFs to a more accessible format (HTML Canvas page, Word). PDFs present significant accessibility challenges, and they do not render properly on mobile devices.
  • Replace inaccessible course content with accessible content, learning activities, or teaching strategies that meet the same learning objectives of the inaccessible content.

STEP 3: Remediate

If the content needs to remain on the website or in the course in its current format, remediate the accessibility errors. The updated, accessible copy of the content should now be used moving forward.

You have a variety of tools available for making Canvas pages accessible. Canvas is equipped with a built-in Canvas Accessibility Checker to assist you with editing a page in Canvas. The tool is displayed via an accessibility symbol at the bottom right of the editor window and is compatible with screen readers.

In the course navigation, you can find/enable the Ally Course Accessibility Checker and UDOIT. Both of these tools will help you identify and remediate accessibility issues.

We recommend using Microsoft Word 365 to remediate your Word docs for the best results. You can find the Accessibility Checker under the “Review” tab.

Please carefully review the “Replace” section of this page. It’s likely there is a better option than using the PDF format, which can be difficult and troublesome to make accessible. If you do need to remediate a PDF, Adobe Acrobat is available to all faculty via Adobe Creative Cloud (log in using your BC credentials). It contains two tools that can help you:

Use Guided Actions

This is Acrobat’s accessibility wizard. This is a good place to start.

Prepare for Accessibility

This tool provides a more selective and manual approach to remediating your PDF, but also has the ability to auto-tag your PDF and run an accessibility checker on the entire document.

You can find the Accessibility Checker under the the “Review” tab in both PowerPoint 365 and the desktop version. The Accessibility Checker in PowerPoint will flag accessibility issues in your presentation, explain why they are a problem, and provide suggestions to resolve any issues that need to be addressed.