Format Effectively with the RCE

"Can I just leave my pages with bold text for my headings and create a list using dashes and spaces? It looks the same to me."

The simple answer is: No.

Screen reader devices rely on the specific HTML tags to indicate true headings (and lists, tables, etc.) in order to navigate a page.

Luckily, using the RCE makes effective formatting easy!

HTML

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is a standardized formatting language for tagging web text to achieve font, color, graphic, and hyperlink effects.

It tells browsers how to lay out and display the content on the page. Access to basic HTML—which you have through the Canvas Rich Content Editor—gives you greater control over the appearance of your pages. Using any of the RCE tools will create different types of tags. For example, if you use the bulleted list tool in the RCE tool, you are creating an unordered <ol> HTML tag.

With tags, screen readers are able to decipher what the object is whether it is a numbered list, unordered list, a paragraph, an image, a link, etc.

How Screen Readers Interpret the Tags

<p>Here's a paragraph.</p>

<h2>Here's a heading 2.</h2>

<p>Here's a bulleted (unordered) list: </p>

<ul>

</ul>

What It Looks Like to Us

Here's a paragraph.

Here's a heading 2.

Here's a bulleted list:

Item 1
Item 2

If things aren't tagged properly, it all looks like plain old "regular" text to a screen reader making it very hard for a student to successfully navigate and make sense of the page.

Before we dive into how to use the Canvas Rich Content Editor to format easily, let's share our real-world experience with how disabilities can impact learning.