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In your Sandbox, you have a variety of template pages with example banners and buttons. You can use the examples as-is or follow the instructions on how customize them.

Create Custom Banners and Buttons

If you'd like to customize the text and images on your banners or buttons, we have created Google slide templates to make this quick and easy.

First, log into your Google drive using your UMass email NetID@umass.edu, then use these links to access the Google slides:

Watch or Listen

In this example, we walk through how to create a custom banner and button using the Google slide templates.

How to create custom banners and buttons for your Canvas home page

Free High-Quality Images

If you'd like to refresh your course with new images, here are great sites with free public-domain images:

Tips

Alt Text for images: Canvas makes it easy to insert Alt Text for all images in your course. When you are editing a page, you will see the Accessibility Checker button in the bottom right corner of the Rich Content Editor. It will show a number when there are issues that need to be fixed.

If you mark images as "decorative," screen readers will skip them. This is usually fine for banner images that do not contain educational content. Buttons, however, should have Alt Text explaining where the button leads.

Try It!

Create a custom home page banner by completing these tasks:

Find a favorite image (or multiple images) to use in your course banner.
Go to the Google slide template for Home Page Banners and select "Make a copy" to add this to your Google drive.
Select a banner, duplicated it, and replace the image(s).
Download the banner as a PNG file.
Insert your new banner image into your home page and set the Alt Text to "Decorative."