Panorama
Panorama is a commercial, programmatic accessibility checker that is installed as a kind of plug-in in Brightspace, and can be used in a role based way by everyone with a PCC email.
What It Can’t Do
Panorama cannot guarantee equal access to information. Neither can any automated checker.
Automated tools reliably detect roughly 30% of WCAG issues. They excel at finding missing things—alt text that doesn’t exist, titles that were never added, headings that aren’t there. They struggle with quality—whether that alt text actually describes the image, whether the heading structure makes sense, whether a student using a screen reader can actually learn from your materials.
What It Actually Does Well
Panorama is excellent at identifying places where information is missing entirely, and patterns throughout a document, course, department, and institutions as a whole. For instructors it can highlight:
- PDFs with no text — Scanned documents that a screen reader can’t read at all
- Images without descriptions — Visual content with no text alternative
- Documents missing titles — Files that lack basic metadata
- Sorting by severity — Helps you find the most critical issues first
- Counting occurrences — Shows which files have the most issues
These are exactly the kinds of problems worth finding first. Use Panorama to locate them:
- Finding Critical Issues — Step-by-step guide to using Panorama’s issue sorting
- Finding High-Traffic Files — Prioritize by what students actually use
Key Issues Regarding How Panorama Works
Panorama scans your course via the Content tool as well as anything where you might see the WYSIWYG editor (like Announcements, Discussions, Assignments, etc). It can be misleading what the score icons refer to. Here are some important things to keep in mind:
Descriptions Only
For Quizzes, Assignments, and some content items like Modules: Panorama has scanned and is scoring only the description or details of that item as added using D2L.
Aggressive Caching
Panorama extensively caches your Content. This can make your scores out of date with your files. It often takes reprocessing your course twice to clear cached files.
Duplicate Scores
Duplicate scores for content is frequent and this can have big impacts on overall course scores.
Monthly Updates
Panorama updates, and therefore changes, every month. PCC is not in charge of this schedule or what gets added, removed, broken, or finally starts working. Online Learning does extensive testing and reports issues fast and frequently.
Unverified Tests
It has not been verified that all tests work correctly. This causes scores to change without the document changing for a number of reasons.
False Positives
Programmatic checkers create false positives. One of the most common is contrast issues (and therefore it can be assumed a frequent false negative). At some point contrast might be something like reading order where it can be manually verified.