During my summer externship with the College of Southern Idaho, I worked on a digital accessibility project focused on improving existing Canvas courses. I reviewed courses for common accessibility barriers and remediated the content to make it more usable for students with disabilities and students who rely on assistive technologies. This included correcting font sizes and formatting, improving color contrast, creating appropriate alternative text for images, and ensuring hyperlinks included meaningful descriptions. The project gave me practical experience applying accessibility principles to real-world educational materials and thinking about course design from the perspective of diverse learners.

This helped me to better prepare myself and my collaborating teachers to keep our online course work as ADA compliant as possible. My School district hasn’t had as in-depth training as this externship was, and now we are ready to better support our students, through these simple yet important changes.