Creating Accessible Links in Canvas

Links are a common and helpful way to direct students to additional resources. Ensuring these links are accessible is one of the easiest and most important steps in making your page content accessible. 

All links on your page should be attached to descriptive and relevant text that clearly explains the content they lead to, even when taken out of context. This helps users to know exactly where they are going if they follow the link. This is especially important for screen reader users, who rely on links to navigate pages. Vague text like “click here” or “learn more” does not give the user any idea of what information they will find by following the link. 

For example, if you wanted to add a link about caption information you could say something like “To find out more information, read USU’s Caption Quality Standards.” It’s important that the link is attached to “USU’s Caption Quality Standards” instead of “find out more information” as that tells a user what the information is about.

There's no strict rule for the length of link text, so use your judgment to determine the appropriate length. As a general guideline, keep the text as short as possible while still conveying the necessary meaning.

Every link should lead to a functional page that can be accessed by those following the link. Broken or dead links can lead to frustration for users. Check periodically to ensure all the links in your course are still working.

Additionally, please only use underlined text for links. This standard helps everybody (especially color-blind and low-vision users) see links when skimming through a document.

Adding Links to Your Canvas Page

You can attach links to text on your page using the Canvas toolbar. Highlight the text you want to turn into a link and click the 'Links' option in the toolbar. For an external link, a box will appear where you can paste or type the URL. For a course link, a box will appear with a list of pages, assignments, and other course materials, allowing you to select one to link to.

Check Links on a Page

Make sure to check the text and validity of the links on your Canvas pages. There’s a simple way to view all the links on a given Canvas page, allowing you to easily review the text and navigate to the respective pages. Open Design Tools and select the Accessibility tab in the top toolbar. Select “Link Checker.” This will pull up a list of every link on your page in order of appearance. 

You can use this list to navigate to or edit each link on the page. To edit the link text or URL, simply select the edit button next to the link. This will also cause the page to automatically jump to the linked content.

Check Links in the Course

If your course has many pages, it can be helpful to identify all broken links across the entire course. Fortunately, Canvas has a built-in Course Link Validator to do this. To use the validator, go to the settings page on the left side of your Canvas course. There will be a list of options on the right side of the settings page. Select the last one, labeled “Validate Links in Content.” 

Once you have done this, a page will open with an option to run the Course Link Validator. Select “Start Link Validation” to run the tool:

The validator may take a few minutes to run. Once it is done, it will present a list of broken or suspicious links, listed by page.

There are two kinds of broken links that Canvas may present to you in the link validator. The first kind are external links that lead to invalid or unreachable websites. Visit the Canvas page where the link is located to review and fix it, or remove it if the page it links to no longer exists. If the link does work, you can leave the link and ignore the issue.

The other kind are links to Canvas content located in a different course, which may be unavailable to the students in the current course. Check each of these links to make sure that they can be accessed by the students in your course, and remove or update them as necessary.