SensusAccess offers two ways for MiraCosta faculty, classified professionals, and students to convert all kinds of documents and files into alternative and more accessible formats:
SensusAccess is available now.
A website that allows anyone to upload files including Word or PPT documents, scanned images, PDFs, or web pages and generate accessible alternative types of files and media, including audio, e-books, Braille, and large print. This helps meet accessibility standards and enhance inclusion by supporting diverse preferences and needs of users.
A Canvas integration that automatically enables conversion of files uploaded into Canvas into alternate file and media types and languages. (This replaces functionality that was previously provided in Canvas through Ally.)
Key Features
Automated conversion of files into a range of alternative media and file formats
Remediation of inaccessible documents such as image only PDFs into accessible formats
Language to language translation with a high degree of accuracy
Pope Tech is an accessibility remediation tool available to instructors in Canvas. This tool gives instructors a quick but powerful way to check for and fix common accessibility concerns in Canvas content. Ensuring your Canvas courses are free of accessibility concerns helps support inclusion and equity for all students, and also is a requirement of MiraCosta policies as well as state and federal regulations.
MiraCosta College has two Pope Tech Canvas LMS tools:
Accessibility Guide – a page-by-page accessibility checker and remediation assistant for Canvas
Accessibility Dashboard – a course-level dashboard allowing you to review and correct accessibility issues throughout an entire Canvas course
Pope Tech Accesibility Guide Overview (PDF) is a handy 2-page overview. You may also watch this 7-minute video for a helpful demonstration of how Pope Tech works in Canvas:
Instructor Accessibility Guide: Demo for Canvas LMS
Pope Tech Detailed Guidance
Click any of the items below to view more details, including video guides, for using Pope Tech.
What Canvas elements can be tested? What does Pope Tech check for?
What Canvas elements can faculty test with Pope Tech?
Most areas where faculty use the Canvas Rich Content Editor can be tested with Pope Tech:
Canvas pages
Syllabus
Quiz descriptions
Discussion Topics
Assignments
Announcements
To test a Canvas item for accessibility concerns, activate Pope Tech by selecting the button at left of the Cancel and Save buttons while editing any of the Canvas items above. Pope Tech works even when the item is not yet published.
What does Pope Tech check for?
If headers are present or skipped
Flags suspicious alt text for images (contains “image of”, “image”, etc.)
Color contrast between text and highlighted colored-background (Note: doesn’t check color contrast within images)
If font size is readable
Flags non-descriptive links such as “click here”, “link”, “more”, “read more”
Flags redundant links
Flags tables that lack at least one header and caption.
Flags YouTube, Canvas embedded video and Canvas embedded audio to bring awareness media will need to be manually reviewed for captions
Flags potential inaccessible files that need to be manually reviewed
How do I use Pope Tech?
Using Pope Tech is simple and intuitive.
Step 1: Open Pope Tech
To access the PopeTech Course Dashboard tool, click Pope Tech Accessibility in any Canvas course menu.
To test an individual Canvas item for accessibility concerns, activate Pope Tech by selecting the icon next to the Cancel and Save buttons on a Canvas item while using the Rich Content Editor.
Step 2: Use Pope Tech to Locate and Fix Accessibility Issues
When Pope Tech is activated, the Pope Tech menu appears on the right-hand side of the screen. At the top of the interface, the number of errors and alerts will need to be addressed.
Errors are accessibility errors and should be looked at for remediation.
Alerts are suspicious areas. Alerts may or may not be an accessibility error. The user should review these and fix if necessary.
Rescan can be used once errors and alerts are fixed. This will allow the user to scan the page a second time and verify that all fixes were applied correctly.
Note: Files, videos, and audio will always be listed as alerts, as these require manual review with human eyes!
In the example below, we have 11 errors and 4 alerts.
In the Pope Tech interface, results are organized by the following categories:
Images and Links
Text and Contrast
Headings
Tables and Lists
Documents and Videos
Each of the categories can be expanded to show the errors or alerts. To view the content raising an error or alert:
Select the arrow displayed next to any category name. Once you expand a category, Pope Tech will display fields grouping together issues within that category.
Click any field to view detailed results and how to fix them.
Click a particular result to highlight the indicated content within the Canvas editor, enabling you to fix that content.
This quick (42 second) video demonstrates the process described above:
Video Demos: Fixing Alternative Text, Color Contrast, and Table Errors
Fixing Alternative Text
Alternative Text errors are listed in the Images and Links category of the Pope Tech tool. This video demonstrates how to fix such errors:
https://youtu.be/sHs7gQLaihs
Fixing Color Contrast
Color Contrast errors are listed in the Text and Contrast category of the Pope Tech tool. Users can fix color contrast errors by one of two methods:
Adjust the color in the Canvas rich text editor.
Adjust the contrast by using the sliders in the Pope Tech interface until the interface displays a “Pass” message.
This video demonstrates how to fix such errors:
https://youtu.be/2aDRvb-VGBA
Fixing Table Captions and Headers
Table errors are listed in the Tables and Lists area of Pope Tech. Using Pope Tech, it is very simple to add a table caption and designate whether the first row or the first column must be the header. This video demonstrates how to fix such errors:
https://youtu.be/AFPkAQ4knDw
Accessibility Issues Explained, from PopeTech
Click any link below for details about common accessibility issues, why it matters, and what to do to fix/avoid the issue.
Thanks to Tracy Schaelen of Southwestern College for originally developing content represented here, and to Liesl Boswell of the CCC Accessibility Center for some modifications and suggestions.
I hope you had a great break! Please see below for quick reminders of great MiraCosta resources to help you enable your students to succeed in online environments this spring! Note the highlights of NEW items and upcoming workshops!
Expectations and Recommendations for Faculty Teaching Online
Zero- and Low-Textbook Cost Course Sections – If you are teaching one of these, please be sure to mark your class in SURF as LTC or ZTC if you haven’t already, so students know that your class has lowered that access barrier!
The TIC website is a great starting point for all kinds of information and support for teaching with online technologies – see the last section of this email for specific TIC links to MiraCosta technologies supporting online teaching and learning.
Ongoing faculty support – You can set a meeting with our Instructional Designer, Nadia Khan, any time. Also, look for Jim Sullivan’s announcements about the 2x/monthly Teaching With Tech sessions that he, Nadia, and I do on Zoom, Wednesdays at 1 pm.
Tech Support – Canvas options include 24×7 phone and chat support. Just click the Tech Support button at lower left in Canvas! Zoom and other MiraCostatech support for faculty is available through the MiraCosta employee help desk.
Support for Your Students – Please help your students to be aware of and make use of these important services and resources!
Student Online Academic Readiness workshops– In collaboration with the library, I’ll be offering a number of these across the first nine weeks of the term – see all dates and times on the TASC site and in Canvas announcements. These workshops engage students with resources MiraCosta provides to support them, as well as habits and attitudes of successful online students. Encourage your students to attend and, if you like, find out which of your students participated in order to incentivize their attendance. I welcome faculty to attend as well!
Online Student Support Access Points – the Student Support Hubin Canvas, accessed via the Student Support button on the left in Canvas, gives quick access to online support from the library, STEM & MLC, online tutoring, writing center, counseling, career center, open computer lab staff, student help desk, health services, CARE team, and more! The Ask the Spartan chat integrated into MiraCosta’s website provides both automated responses and the opportunity to connect to Live Chat with staff from many student support areas. The Help Hut and Online Education webpages are also great starting points for students to connect with all kinds of support services when they’re not in Canvas.
Tech Support – At lower left in Canvas is a button for students to quickly access Tech Support options, including 24×7 phone and chat support from Canvas, and our local MiraCosta student help desk.
Technology Needs – Be sure to share the form for students to fill out if they need to borrow a laptop and/or internet hotspot.
MiraCosta’s Online Education Tools
Click the links for a detailed MiraCosta-specific overview (and often, recorded Flex workshops) for each tool below. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have questions about these or other resources.
Zoom – if you’re using Zoom, make sure you’re using a pro Zoom account through MiraCosta. NEW: Zoom’s integration with Canvas has been updated. Faculty who use this integration must re-enable the Zoom LTI.
Canvas Studio – enables faculty and students to create videos while inside Canvas. Faculty can create interactive discussion or quiz activities based on video.
Pronto is an incredible mobile-friendly and Canvas-integrated messaging platform that’s ready to use in every course.
Perusall is a social annotation tool available within Canvas that makes it easy for students to comment/discuss right on a text, document, or image.
Lab Archives Electronic Notebook is an online notebook especially useful for translating lab manuals and student notes/work into the online environment.
Pope Tech helps faculty detect and correct accessibility issues within Canvas. NEW: the PopeTech dashboard tool added to Canvas last summer via the Pope Tech Accessibility course menu item provides a course-level overview for addressing all accessibility issues in a course in one place, rather than having to go item-by-item through Canvas.
SensusAccess is a NEW tool added last summer to provide multi-format course material accessibility and file type conversion options for students. If you notice an S symbol next to your page title and next to items in the Modules view, that’s SensusAccess.
PlayPosit – This video interaction tool offers more complexity and options than Studio. Studio is a great place to start, but if you’re looking for more types of interactivity to add to your videos, PlayPosit is great.
Turnitin – help students learn to properly cite sources and avoid plagiarism. Also provides grading and peer review tools for written work. Turnitin has included an AI detection capability for instructors, but please beware of false positives should you use it. Most experts agree that AI detection tools are extremely unreliable.
Best wishes for a super spring!
Jim Julius, Ed.D. Faculty Coordinator, Online Education
The way that Zoom is integrated with Canvas was updated over the 2023-24 winter break to Zoom LTI 1.3. For all who share Zoom meetings and recordings within Canvas using the Zoom integration, you will need to re-enable the Zoom LTI menu option within your spring 2024 Canvas courses. If you have Zoom recordings, those are safely within your Zoom account and can be accessed once you re-enable the Zoom menu option within each Canvas course.
NOTE: Faculty have the option to share Zoom links to meetings and recordings directly in Canvas courses rather than using the Zoom LTI integration described below.
Enable the Canvas Zoom LTI 1.3 Integration & View Past Meetings/Recordings
Enter your Canvas course
Click Settings on the course menu
Click the Navigation tab
Click the 3 dots to the right of Zoom and select Enable.
Click the Save button
6. Click the Zoom course menu item which will appear in your course menu.
7. Click All My Zoom Meetings / Recordings to view all past course zoom meetings and recordings.
Zoom provides a reliable, easy-to-use, mobile-friendly tool for live, recordable online presentations, meetings, and discussions with audio, video, chat, screen sharing, polling, and more. It can be used within Canvas or independently.
Zoom Pro is available to all MiraCosta faculty and staff at no charge. Students don’t use the Zoom Pro account but can use free Zoom basic accounts. Nobody at MiraCosta should be paying anything to use Zoom!
The version of Zoom that MiraCostans use changed after the fall 2020 semester; MiraCosta Zoom is now accessed at miracosta-edu.zoom.us rather than conferzoom.org or cccconfer.zoom.us. Faculty need to sign in to Zoom with their MiraCosta College login and password to obtain unlimited pro (“licensed”) access to all features of Zoom, including:
Unlimited meeting lengths and very large numbers of attendees
Recordings “in the cloud” so that you do not need to manage large files of your recorded meetings
Auto-transcription of your cloud-based Zoom recordings
This page includes basic technical how-to information and resources on using Zoom in general, and Zoom use in tandem with Canvas. Please see our separate Teaching with Zoom at MiraCosta College page for more detailed tips about teaching securely, effectively, and accessibly with Zoom.
Log On to Zoom at MiraCosta College
To access your Zoom account via the web go to: https://miracosta-edu.zoom.us Sign in with your MiraCosta College employee account and two-factor authentication (2FA).
How do I get a Zoom account? If you had a pro Zoom account through ConferZoom prior to 2021, it should have been automatically migrated to the MiraCosta Zoom, and there’s nothing you need to do. If you did not previously have a Pro Zoom account, and need to create a MiraCosta Zoom account, sign in to the MiraCosta Help Desk in the Portal and select the User Accounts option.
What if I’m having trouble with my Zoom account? Sign in to the MiraCosta Help Desk in the Portal and click the User Accounts button to request help.
What happened to my Zoom recordings made before 2021? They are still in your Zoom account! The old links to Zoom recordings will still work, but a message will briefly appear when people click an old link. If you update an old recording link with the new MiraCosta Zoom URL (replace cccconfer.zoom.us with miracosta-edu.zoom.us in the link) it will work seamlessly.
What happened to my recurring Zoom meetings I set up before 2021? Similar to your recordings, old links to recurring Zoom meetings will still work, but a message will appear when people click an old link. If you go to your Zoom account, you’ll see that your meetings have been migrated in, and you can get a new invitation. You can also simply update a meeting link created before 2021 with the new MiraCosta Zoom URL (replace cccconfer.zoom.us with miracosta-edu.zoom.us in the link).
What happened to Reports from Zoom meetings held before 2021? They are gone, sorry.
How much storage do I have for Zoom recordings? As of spring 2021, there is not a limit; however, this may change in the future if we do not manage our recordings well. Please delete recordings that you do not need.
Zoom Documentation
The following Zoom trainings, documentation, and resources can help you stay informed:
You can schedule and share Zoom meetings and recordings directly within Canvas, using the Zoom integration. To get started and learn more about the Zoom/Canvas integration, see directions below.
Note: You may also share individual Zoom meeting links and recordings in Canvas without using the integration.
Canvas Integration with Zoom
Enter your Canvas course
Click Settings on the course menu
Click the Navigation tab
Click the 3 dots to the right of Zoom and select Enable.
Click the Save button
Click the Zoom course menu item which will appear in your course menu.
Now you can schedule and access Zoom meetings from inside of Canvas.
Viewing All My Zoom Meetings in Canvas
When you first enter Zoom on Canvas you will see only the Zoom meetings associated with the Canvas course you entered from. To see and access all Zoom meetings within your account, click the link ‘All My Zoom Meetings‘.
button at left of the Cancel and Save buttons while editing any of the Canvas items above. Pope Tech works even when the item is not yet published.
