Why Your Visuals Need More Than Canva for Accessibility and Alt Text

You’ll need more than just Canva to make your reports and presentations accessible to everyone.

Canva’s Accessibility Checker can now detect and prompt for alt-text on images, scrutinize color contrast, and generate simple reading order and heading tagging for PDFs. That’s long overdue; however, Canva’s accessible exports still fall short and require additional tools like Microsoft Word or PowerPoint to incorporate accessibility. Canva makes these shortcomings worse by setting up the case of "flexibility that supports creativity" versus "structure that supports accessibility.”

Canva has always been a laggard in the accessibility space and is making only soft attempts to improve. The market leader should be the market leader in all important aspects.

What Canva Says Officially

Canva’s policies emphasize that accessibility and inclusion are not add-ons—they’re integral to product design, operations, and values. Canva aims to meet and go beyond WCAG 2.2 AA standards and publish Accessibility Conformance Reports.

Canva’s recent updates include tools for alt text reminders, color-contrast checks, simple tagging for headings and reading order in PDFs, captioning, keyboard navigation, and customizable accessibility settings.

Canva openly acknowledges that they are not fully compliant yet, especially when it comes to alternative text. But outputs fall short of full accessibility compliance. Downstream outputs don't meet full accessibility compliance. Canva suggests manual fixes.

Maybe There’s A Reason Why Canva isn't Canva More Accessible

OK, there are always reasons why attention to accessibility is not up to par.

Canva gives users total creative freedom, which doesn’t align easily with the structured, linear layout screen readers depend on.

Canva's focus appears to be on accessibility for simple designs, especially ones not meant for full electronic distribution (e.g., social media posts or provided into other downstream programs like Word or PowerPoint.

The explanations are underwhelming.

The Importance of Alternative Text

Alternative text (alt text) is beneficial because it clearly explains the meaning or purpose of an image, making content accessible to people with visual impairments who use screen readers or when small images are difficult to read.

For the entire audience, alt text acts like a quick caption or description that reinforces the message, improves comprehension, and ensures no one misses valuable information.

Alt text turns images into clear, meaningful communication.

Why Alt Text Requires More Than Canva

Canva is making strides by embedding accessibility into core product values and releasing tools for better inclusive designs. However, its highly visual and unstructured design environment is at odds with structured accessibility requirements. Canva appears to be saying that creativity comes at the expense of accessibility. As a result, more complex content relies on external fixes or other tools to be fully accessible.

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JD Solomon is the author of Communicating Reliability, Risk & Resiliency to Decision Makers: How to Get Your Boss’s Boss to Understand and Facilitating with FINESSE: A Guide to Successful Business Solutions.

Microsoft Office Is Not Forgetting the Colorblind (and neither should you)

Microsoft Office and Communicating with FINESSE understand that making reports and presentations more accessible improves the experience for everyone.

Most of us provide too little time at the end to do quality reviews on our PowerPoint, Word, and Excel documents. Less than five percent of us actually do the accessibility check for those with visual impairments and colorblindness.

These are a few ways that Microsoft Office and Communicating with FINESSE make it easier for you to reach everyone with your reports and presentations.

Newer or Emerging Approaches from Microsoft Office

1. Enhanced Accessibility Assistant (Word, Outlook, PowerPoint), including slide-by-slide notifications for poor color contrast, alt-text issues, and more.

2. Improved PDF Export Accessibility (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), making documents exported into PDF much more navigable for screen readers. This includes things like heading tags, bookmarks, alt-text for SmartArt/WordArt, table headers, equation tagging, and footnote/endnote links.

3. Accessibility Assistant Updates in Word that now flag Color & Contrast, Media & Illustrations, Tables, Document Structure, and Document Access.

If you have not used these newer features, explore them under Review|Check Accessibility and then hit the top icon in the accessibility tab. The Accessibility Assistant should pop up in the side pane, including the option to show accessibility fixes on each slide, page, or tab.

Don’t Wait Until the End

I recommend reversing the traditional approach for developing reports and presentations by starting with accessibility. While conceptually intuitive, modifying your approach takes structure and discipline, and runs against many traditional organizational approaches.

Looking for a Better Way to Develop Business Presentations?

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Communicating with FINESSE is a not-for-profit community of technical professionals dedicated to being highly effective communicators and facilitators. Learn more about our publications, webinars, and workshops.

Seven Common Ethical Issues for Water Utilities

Procurement and Employment top the list of ethical issues for water utilities and their major capital improvement programs.

Whether it's for the enterprise or a major infrastructure program, there are a handful of ethical issues that are common to all water utilities. These are the issues that can get you fired and often result in court action. At best, encountering these ethical issues with a pre-planned approach will stagnate your career. There are three key solutions provided at the end of the article.

The Top Seven Ethical Issues for Water Utilities

1 - Procurement

Most water utilities have procurement standards or ordinances; however, many are outdated or do not incorporate the needs of big programs. In the case of alternative project delivery, the run-and-gun pace often sets up ethical dilemmas. In all cases, staff preferences combined with the quantity and size of water utility purchases lead to decision-making conflicts.

2 - Employment

Hiring and promotions are just as vulnerable to bias as vendor selection. Utility leaders naturally want to work with people they trust, but this preference must never override fair hiring practices. The perception of favoritism can erode morale and public confidence. A transparent recruitment process with clear job requirements and scoring systems helps ensure decisions are merit-based.

3 - Involvement with Staff

Too much involvement with staff is a trap many board members fall into. The ethical dilemma relates to the decision-making responsibility at the policy level versus the decision-making experience at the operational level. Board members and staff need to work as a team while staying in their designated lanes. The art of communicating openly while honoring the boundaries between policy leadership and operational control is challenging in most organizations.

4 - Committees

Committees, whether part of a utility board or a major program oversight team, are meant to study issues in detail and make recommendations. Ethical concerns arise when committees overstep their authority, make binding decisions without proper approval, or fail to maintain transparency in their deliberations. A well-defined charter, open meeting practices, and clear reporting lines can help, but are usually not enough.

5 - Donations and Community Engagement

Water utilities are integral parts of their communities and are asked to sponsor events, support nonprofits, or contribute resources. Capital infrastructure programs usually require extra support in the community based on their scope and timelines. It’s easy to blur the lines when requests come from influential vendors, political figures, or community activists.

6 - Social Media

Social media is a minefield for ethical missteps. Staff or board members posting personal opinions may inadvertently misrepresent the utility, release sensitive information, or damage public trust. Even “liking” or sharing certain posts can be perceived as endorsing a position.

7 - Text Messaging and Informal Communication

Quick, informal communications—texts, instant messages, and personal email—are convenient but can raise transparency and records-retention issues. Using texts for decision making or sensitive topics can bypass proper documentation and public oversight. In most U.S. states, text messages are considered “discoverable” in legal proceedings as well as under the freedom of information statutes.

Three Solutions to the Top Seven Ethical Issues

In our training and workshops, we discuss three things that can be used to avoid ethical issues.

Personal Ethics Framework

It’s usually too late if you wait to be confronted with an ethical challenge. Examine each of the seven areas and develop a personal approach to each one. In the wild, every issue will look a little different. However, having an ethical approach in each category will give you a firm foundation for a response.

The Ethics Triangle

Remember, there are different ethical approaches for making decisions. Virtue, Consequences, and Duty-based ethics are the three types that make up the ethics triangle. The Ethics Triangle encourages decision makers to examine an issue from all three angles, leading to decisions that are both principled and practical.

10 Questions Before Interacting with Staff

If you are a board member or an executive leader, reflect on ten questions before interacting with staff. Self-awareness is the best pound of prevention for avoiding ethical issues that impact decision making.

How to Change and Maintain Your Ethical Culture

JD Solomon Inc. provides half-day and full-day training on ethics for board and senior management. Don’t miss out on these highly praised, interactive sessions that bring your team together on ethical issues and decision making.

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JD Solomon Inc. provides solutions for program development, asset management, and facilitation at the nexus of facilities, infrastructure, and the environment. Visit our Program Development page for more information on business cases, third-party assessments, phasing projects, and related services.