Panorama is a useful accessibility tool because it can quickly identify common issues, help prioritize your work, and provide guidance on making improvements. Reaching the green range (70% or higher) is a meaningful accomplishment and often indicates that you’ve addressed many common accessibility barriers.
At the same time, accessibility is more than what can be measured by an automated checker. Panorama can identify many technical issues, but some aspects of accessibility require human judgment, context, and an understanding of how students will interact with content.
If you’ve consistently reached green scores, this may be a good opportunity to explore some of the accessibility concepts that Panorama cannot fully evaluate.
Headings
What Panorama Identifies
Panorama can identify whether heading styles have been used and whether headings generally follow a logical hierarchy (i.e. “missed headings”)
What Panorama Misses
Panorama can identify whether headings exist in a document, but it cannot determine whether headings are being used effectively to organize content and support navigation.
For example, a syllabus might receive a good accessibility score because it includes a Heading 1 for the title. However, if section titles such as Course Description, Learning Objectives, and Course Schedule are only bolded instead of formatted as Heading 2s, the document will still be difficult for screen reader users to navigate. Bolding is a visual cue, but headings provide the structure and document tags that assistive technologies rely on. Without properly applied headings, students may have to read through the entire document to find the information they need.
When reviewing your content, ask yourself:
- Am I using bold text to indicate a new section? If so, I should use a heading style instead.
- Could this document be easier to navigate if I divided it into additional sections using headings?
See the guide on Headings for further explanation and best practices.
Alternative Text
What Panorama Identifies
Panorama can detect when images are missing alternative text and can help you locate those images quickly. It can also take a first pass at generating alt text.
What Panorama Misses
Panorama can identify whether alternative text exists, but it cannot determine whether that alternative text is meaningful.
Many faculty now encounter automatically generated alt text in a variety of platforms and applications. While these tools can provide a useful starting point, they do not understand the instructional purpose of an image.
Consider a chart, historical photograph, scientific diagram, artwork, or map. An automated description may identify what appears in the image, but it may not communicate the information you expect your students to learn from it. For complex images, alternative text alone may not be enough. In these cases, key information from the image should also be provided in the surrounding text, a caption, or another accessible format.
When reviewing an image, ask yourself:
- What information would a student miss if they could not see this image?
- Does my alternative text communicate that information, rather than simply describe what the image looks like?
- If the image is complex, have I provided the important details somewhere beyond the alternative text?
See the guide on Alternative Text for further explanation and best practices for writing alt text.
Tables
What Panorama Identifies
Panorama can identify many accessibility issues with tables, including missing header rows, that make them difficult for assistive technology to interpret.
What Panorama Misses
Panorama cannot determine whether a table is the appropriate way to present information.
In many cases, tables are used primarily for visual layout or organization rather than to convey relationships between rows and columns. While a table may be technically accessible after remediation, it may still not be the clearest or most usable way to present information.
Before fixing a table, consider whether the information would be better presented as:
- A bulleted list
- Multiple headings and sections
- Separate paragraphs
Sometimes the most accessible table is no table at all.
See the guide on Lists & Tables for further explanation and best practices.
Color and Meaning
What Panorama Identifies
Panorama can identify many color contrast concerns and help alert you when text may be difficult to read because of insufficient contrast.
What Panorama Misses
Panorama cannot always determine if color is being used as the only way to communicate meaning.
For example:
- “Texts highlighted in red are required reading.”
- “Students who are passing are shown in green.”
Students who cannot distinguish those colors may miss the information entirely.
Instead, color should reinforce information rather than be the sole method of communicating it. Labels, icons, symbols, and descriptive text help ensure that all students can understand the content regardless of how they perceive color.
See the guide on Color & Contrast for further explanation and best practices.
Beyond the Score
Accessibility work often progresses in stages. For many faculty, Panorama has helped identify and address common technical issues, which is an important accomplishment. As those issues become less common, there is an opportunity to spend more time thinking about how students experience your course’s content.
Rather than only asking, “Does this pass?”, consider additional questions like: “Would headings help someone navigate the page?”, “Does this alt text communicate what matters?”, or “Is this table the clearest way to present information?” These are questions that no automated checker can fully answer, but they are often where meaningful accessibility improvements happen.
