As higher education institutions increasingly prioritize accessibility and inclusive teaching, many institutions struggle to move beyond one-time compliance initiatives toward sustained instructional change. At the same time, many Centers for Teaching and Learning face a challenge of how to support hundreds of instructors in making meaningful accessibility improvements without overwhelming faculty or staff capacity. At a medium-sized private university, the Center for Learning Innovation has initiated a faculty development approach focused on improving accessibility within Canvas course sites. This lightning talk shares a scalable faculty-development initiative designed to help approximately course instructors to improve course accessibility within Canvas using its built-in Accessibility Checker aligned with WCAG 2.1AA standards. This lightning talk shares how our team analyzed more than 70 Canvas courses to identify recurring accessibility issues aligned with WCAG 2.1AA standards and translated those findings into a practical instructor guide supported by the Canvas Accessibility Checker. Rather than framing accessibility as compliance requirement, we reframed accessibility work as a teaching-and-learning enhancement grounded in Universal Design for Learning (UDL). Participants will leave with a replicable model demonstrating how they can use LMS analytics, targeted guidance, for launching or scaling similar initiatives at their own institutions to build institutional momentum toward accessible course design.
