How to Fix Your Ally Score in Canvas — Without Losing Your Weekend

You got the email. Maybe it was from your department chair, maybe from the instructional design office, maybe from an associate dean you've never spoken to. The message boils down to this: your Canvas course has an Ally accessibility score of 43%, and the institution wants you at 85% or higher by end of semester. You opened the Ally report, and there are 47 issues staring back at you. Now what?

Take a breath. This is fixable, and it probably won't take as long as you think. The trick is knowing which issues matter most and tackling them in the right order. Most instructors can get from a failing score to a passing one in a few focused hours — not a whole weekend.

What actually affects your score the most

Ally calculates a score for every content item in your course — every uploaded PDF, every image, every page. Your overall course score is the average of all those individual scores. That means a single untagged 0%-scoring PDF drags down your average just as much as ten perfectly accessible pages pull it up.

Here's how the most common issue types rank by impact on your score:

The critical thing to understand: untagged PDFs score zero. Not low — literally zero percent. If you have ten content items in your course and three of them are untagged PDFs, those three items are pulling your entire course average down by nearly 30 percentage points all on their own.

The 80/20 — what to fix first

You don't need to fix everything to get a good score. You need to fix the right things. In almost every course, three issue types account for 80% or more of the score drop:

1. PDFs first. Untagged PDFs are the single biggest score killer. Each one drags your average toward zero. Fix these and your score jumps immediately.
2. Alt text on images. Images without descriptions are the second most common issue. They score low and most courses have a lot of them — lecture slides with diagrams, screenshots, charts, photos.
3. Heading structure. Canvas pages and assignments with no headings, or with headings that skip levels, score poorly. Fixing heading order is quick once you know how.

Fix just those three things — PDFs, alt text, headings — and you'll usually jump from the 40s to the 80s. Everything else is polish.

How to fix PDFs

When Ally says a PDF is "untagged," it means the file doesn't have an internal structure that screen readers can follow. Think of tags as an invisible table of contents baked into the PDF — they tell assistive technology which chunks of text are headings, which are paragraphs, which are list items, and what order to read them in. Without tags, a screen reader just sees a wall of text with no structure.

The process of adding these tags is called PDF remediation, and historically it has been painful. Here are your options:

Adobe Acrobat Pro

Acrobat's accessibility tools let you add tags manually. You open the PDF, run the "Autotag" feature, then go through and fix every tag it got wrong — which is often a lot of them. A simple 10-page syllabus might take 30–60 minutes. A 40-page study guide with tables and figures can take half a day. If you only have one or two PDFs, this is doable. If you have a dozen, it's a grind. And you need a Pro license, which runs roughly $23/month.

Vendor remediation

Some institutions contract with document remediation vendors. They'll tag your PDFs for you, but at $200–400 per document (more for complex layouts), costs add up fast. Turnaround is typically 3–10 business days, which may not help if you're facing an end-of-semester deadline.

FixAllyScore

FixAllyScore automates PDF/UA tagging. You point it at your files, it analyzes the document structure, applies standards-compliant tags, sets reading order, and generates alt text for images it finds inside the PDF. What used to take an hour per document takes about 30 seconds. It runs locally on your machine — your files never leave your computer — and it handles batch processing, so you can fix all your PDFs in one pass. Download it free here.

How to fix alt text

Alt text (alternative text) is a written description attached to an image so that people who can't see the image understand what it conveys. In Canvas, you add alt text when you insert an image into a page, assignment, or discussion, or by editing an image you've already placed.

The key to good alt text is describing what the image communicates in context, not just what it literally depicts. A few guidelines:

• For photos and illustrations: Describe what's shown and why it matters for the content. "Students collaborating on a lab experiment with beakers and a Bunsen burner" is better than "photo" or "image1.jpg."
• For charts and graphs: Describe the takeaway, not every data point. "Bar chart showing enrollment increasing 40% from 2020 to 2025" tells a screen reader user what the chart means. You don't need to narrate every bar.
• For diagrams and flowcharts: Summarize the process or relationship. If the diagram is complex, consider adding a text-based description in the body of the page as well.
• For decorative images: Mark them as decorative (empty alt text). But be honest about what's actually decorative. A border or a spacer is decorative. A photo of a historical figure in a history course is not — that's content.

Aim for 10–125 characters in most cases. Be specific. Be concise. If you find yourself writing a paragraph, the image probably needs a longer description in the page body instead.

How to fix headings

Heading structure issues are the easiest to fix and the most common to overlook. The problem usually happens because instructors use bold text to create visual headings instead of actual heading tags. To a sighted reader, bold text in a large font looks like a heading. To a screen reader, it's just another paragraph — there's no structure to navigate by.

In the Canvas Rich Content Editor, you fix this by:

1. Selecting the text you want as a heading.
2. Using the paragraph dropdown (it usually says "Paragraph" or "p") to change it to Heading 2, Heading 3, or Heading 4.
3. Making sure your headings go in order: H2 → H3 → H4. Never skip from H2 to H4 without an H3 in between.

Why start with H2? Because Canvas uses H1 for the page title automatically. Your first content heading should be H2, subsections under that should be H3, and so on. Think of it like an outline:

• H2: Week 1: Introduction to Biology
•    H3: Required Readings
•    H3: Assignment: Lab Report
•       H4: Submission Guidelines
• H2: Week 2: Cell Structure

This usually takes just a few minutes per page. Go through each Canvas page and assignment, find any bold text that's acting as a heading, and convert it to the appropriate heading level. Quick, free, and it can move your score several points.

The fast way — let FixAllyScore handle it

If you're looking at dozens of PDFs and you'd rather not spend your weekend in Adobe Acrobat, FixAllyScore was built for exactly this. It's a desktop app that runs on your machine. Point it at a folder of PDFs, and it tags them to PDF/UA standards in seconds. It also generates alt text for images embedded in those PDFs and fixes reading order issues.

The free tier handles up to 5 documents per month. For most instructors facing a one-time Ally cleanup, that's enough. If you have a larger backlog, the paid plans handle unlimited files.

Download FixAllyScore free →

Your score doesn't have to be perfect

Here's the thing most people don't realize: you don't need a 100% Ally score. You probably don't even need a 90%. Most institutions set their target at 85%, and many are happy with anything above 80%. Perfection isn't the goal — removing the biggest barriers for students who use assistive technology is.

Get the PDFs tagged so they don't score zero. Get the images described so screen reader users know what they're looking at. Get the headings in order so students can navigate your content. Those three things alone get most courses past 85%.

Your time is better spent teaching than chasing the last five percentage points. Fix what matters, skip what doesn't, and get back to your actual job.