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.