The accessibility conversation often begins with reports, scores, and technical issues that need to be corrected. Those tools are important, but they only tell part of the story. At its core, accessibility is about creating course content that students can successfully access, understand, and use.
As faculty become more familiar with Panorama Course Reports in MyCourses, accessibility scores can provide a helpful overview of potential concerns. Reports can identify files that need attention and help faculty track improvements. However, a score should be viewed as a starting point, not the final measure of an accessible course.
What Does an Accessibility Score Measure?
Automated accessibility tools, like Panorama, are designed to identify specific technical issues. For example, they may flag missing alternative text, document structure problems, or inaccessible files. That feedback is valuable because it can help faculty find and address issues more efficiently.
However, automated tools cannot fully evaluate how students experience course content. They cannot determine whether:
- Alternative text effectively communicates the meaning of an image.
- Instructions are clear and easy to follow.
- Course navigation makes sense to students.
- Content is organized logically.
- Students can quickly find what they need to complete a task.
Those details require human review.
Accessibility and Usability Work Together
Accessibility and usability are closely related, but they are not identical. Accessibility focuses on whether people with diverse abilities can access content. Usability focuses on how easily they can understand, navigate, and use it.
A course can receive a strong accessibility score and still create unnecessary barriers. Imagine two courses with similarly high scores. One includes clear instructions, accurate captions, intuitive navigation, and well-organized content. The other meets many technical requirements but leaves students unsure where to begin, how to complete an assignment, or where to find important information.
Both courses may score well, but only one provides a truly accessible and usable learning experience.
When students spend more time figuring out how a course works than engaging with its content, learning suffers. Course organization, navigation, consistency, and clarity all contribute to the student experience.
Use the Score as a Guide, Not a Grade
Accessibility reports and checkers are essential starting points, but they work best when paired with a review from the student’s perspective. After reviewing a course report, consider asking:
- Are expectations clear?
- Is the course easy to navigate?
- Can students quickly locate assignments and resources?
- Does alternative text explain what an image communicates?
- Are captions accurate and useful?
- Is the content organized consistently?
This combination provides a more complete accessibility review: use technology to identify potential technical issues, then use human judgment to determine whether the course is understandable, usable, and effective.
An accessibility score can identify potential barriers. The student experience tells us whether we have successfully removed them.
Faculty Takeaway
Use your accessibility score as a guide, not a grade. Address the issues identified in the report, but do not stop when the score improves. Review the course as a student would and ask whether the content is clear, organized, easy to navigate, and ready to support learning.
Related Workshops
Accessibility: Beyond the Score will be held online on Wednesday, September 16, 2026, from 10 – 11 a.m.
Accessibility: Improve Content with Copilot will be held on Friday, September 18, 2026 from 3:30 – 4:30 p.m.
For more information, see upcoming accessibility workshops on the GGC Events calendar.