Boost Your Canvas Course Site Accessibility by Removing Outdated Content

As a University of Minnesota instructor, you have likely heard about the new accessibility requirement for course materials outlined by the Department of Justice in their clarifications on Title II of the ADA: all content in course sites with student enrollment–such as academic courses, professional development sites, or resource sites your department created– must be digitally accessible by April 2026. This new requirement comes at a time in education where instructors are busy on multiple technological fronts (can we have a blog post without mentioning AI?).

Yet here we are at another intersection of technology and teaching. This intersection brings about good for all learners. Research shows that making content accessible helps all of your students, not just those who use adaptive technologies to access content. While the task to meet the April 2026 deadline may seem overwhelmingly large, academic technology staff and the Office for Digital Accessibility are breaking it down into manageable steps over the next 12 months. 

Remove unused content

That first manageable step is to take time now to remove unused course content from your Canvas course sites. This step will save you time and effort updating, fixing, or revising unused content to make it accessible. It’s important to note that the DOJ accessibility requirement covers both content published for student viewing and content that remains hidden from students. For example, if you have an unpublished assignment or quiz in your course site, that you plan on publishing in due time it would be included in content that needs to be accessible. Therefore, any content that you won’t be using with students might as well be deleted now.

As Academic Technology Support Services (ATSS) heard from several instructors in a recent usability study on removing unused content, the time between semesters is an ideal time to delete this unused content. While the specific action of deleting content takes minutes, it’s best to set aside some time to go through each content bucket in the course navigation. Start by looking at deleting anything in those buckets–Assignments, Pages, Quizzes, Announcements, etc.-- that remained unpublished for the current semester. Was it unpublished because you no longer plan to use it? Take that moment to delete it from the course site.

The bucket that may take the most time to review is the Files bucket. Every single file you have linked in that course site will appear in the Files area, whether you have used it recently or not. That pre-pandemic syllabus from 2019, still hanging out there woefully outdated and most-likely inaccessible, is a great example of Files that can easily be deleted. If you accidentally delete something, there are ways to undelete and restore Canvas content. 

Archive Canvas content

Some old content may be easy to part with, but you may want to save other materials in case you plan to use them again. Here are two options for archiving or backing up content:

1. Export a Canvas course to your computer or your University Google Drive. 
2. Create a development Canvas course site where you can store old content. Then, if you need it, you can import it into the current course from the development site within minutes. 

With either of these two options, you can access course materials to import them into an active course site when you need them. After importing the content to a course with student enrollment, remember to review and revise the content to be accessible.

Selectively import content to a new Canvas course 

Another way to remove outdated content is to move only relevant or published content forward to next semester's course site by importing specific content from one Canvas course site to another. This option allows you to select only the content you will use and leave any old content behind. Watch this video demonstrating how to import all or specific content (4:49).

As you finish up this semester and transition your course sites to the next semester, take time to delete old, outdated, and unused materials. Scan through all of your content to see what remained unpublished in the current semester and see if that unpublished item can be deleted from the course. Taking the time to do this work now will save your future self time and energy in meeting the April 2026 deadline of having all course materials accessible.

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