Eduspera vs Canvas Catalog: Accessible Non-Credit Programs Compared (2026)

If your university runs Canvas, you have almost certainly met Canvas Catalog: Instructure's storefront for non-credit and continuing-education programmes, which lists courses, takes enrollment and payment, and runs the course itself inside Canvas LMS. Eduspera is a different kind of product — an accessibility-first course platform where accessibility is enforced at the moment content is authored, built for faculty accessibility training, accessible non-credit programmes and Disability Services pilots. This is an honest comparison based on publicly available information about Canvas Catalog and our own knowledge of Eduspera. Features, packaging and pricing change often; if anything here is inaccurate or out of date, the Instructure team is welcome to contact us at [email protected] and we will correct it.

Summary positioning

The short version: these two products answer different questions, and one does not replace the other.

• Canvas Catalog is an enrollment and commerce front-end for courses that run inside Canvas. It is typically bundled or sold with the institution's Canvas contract, and its value comes from that integration: the same identity, the same student information system (SIS), the same reporting, the same course player your faculty already use. If you already run Canvas and want to list, sell and certify non-credit programmes, it is the obvious first candidate.
• Eduspera is an accessibility-enforced authoring and delivery platform. Its value comes from what happens to the content: alt text is required, captions carry a review status, every course gets an accessibility score before it can be published, and learners get reading aids, read-aloud and alternative formats in the player. It does not try to be your LMS.

Put simply: Canvas Catalog makes it easy to sell and run a programme on Canvas. Eduspera makes it hard to publish an inaccessible one. Many institutions will want both, which is why we describe Eduspera as a layer that sits next to Canvas, not instead of it.

Who each product is built for

Canvas Catalog: the continuing-education storefront for Canvas campuses

Canvas Catalog exists for the continuing-education, professional-development and community-programme offices of institutions that already run Canvas. Per Instructure's public materials, it lets a university publish a branded catalogue of courses and programmes, take enrollment and payment, issue certificates of completion, and deliver the learning experience inside Canvas itself. Because it is part of the Canvas family, it inherits the institution's identity provider, SIS connections and reporting. It is bought through the institution's Canvas relationship rather than as a stand-alone subscription, and it is administered by the same Canvas admins and instructional designers. For a campus whose non-credit strategy is "Canvas for everything", that coherence is exactly the point.

Eduspera: the accessible layer for programmes that must ship accessible

Eduspera is built for the parts of a university where accessibility is not a nice-to-have but the deliverable itself. Three cases come up again and again: the faculty accessibility training that every instructor must complete, with per-department completion reporting for the provost's office; accessible non-credit programmes aimed at the public, including disabled learners, where the institution wants evidence rather than assurances; and co-design pilots with Disability Services, where students with disabilities test and shape the content. Eduspera gives those teams an authoring tool that refuses to publish an image without alt text, a player with read-aloud, audio description and alternative formats, and reporting that a compliance officer can export. It is run by the programme owner, not by central IT, and it connects to campus identity through SAML 2.0 single sign-on. See our higher-education overview for how institutions typically deploy it.

Feature comparison (per public information)

The table below reflects each product's public positioning at the time of writing. The markers show the balance at a glance: ✓ Yes a genuine strength, ~ Partial available with limits or to be verified, ✕ No not offered. Where a Canvas Catalog capability depends on the institution's Canvas configuration or contract, we say so — please verify current details with Instructure.

Area	Eduspera	Canvas Catalog (per public info)
Category	Accessibility-enforced course platform — author, deliver and report on accessible programmes	Non-credit storefront and enrollment front-end on top of Canvas LMS
Runs courses inside your existing LMS	✕ No Separate accessible player; Canvas remains your LMS of record	✓ Yes The course runs in Canvas — a public strength
Course listing, enrollment and payment	✓ Yes Branded academy with Stripe checkout, coupons and bundles	✓ Yes Catalogue, enrollment and payment — its core purpose
Alt text required on image upload	✓ Yes Upload is blocked without alt text	~ Partial Not enforced — an instructor can publish images without alt text; needs a companion checker
Captions with an explicit review status	✓ Yes Automatic captions must be reviewed before content is published publicly	~ Partial Captioning supported in Canvas; uncaptioned video can still be published — verify
Per-course accessibility score before publishing	✓ Yes 0–100 score that flags problems before a course goes live	✕ No Not native — typically added via an LMS accessibility checker or overlay
Read-aloud, audio description, alternative formats	✓ Yes Text-to-speech in the player, audio description track for video, PDF/HTML/Markdown per lesson	~ Partial Inherits the Canvas player; alternative formats usually come from a companion tool — verify
App-wide reading aids and self-declared needs	✓ Yes Font, spacing, contrast and focus mode; learners can declare needs (consent-gated) and get suggested aids	~ Partial Accommodations follow the institution's process; not a documented Catalog feature — verify
Single sign-on	✓ Yes SAML 2.0, just-in-time provisioning by email domain, InCommon metadata supported	✓ Yes Deeply integrated with Canvas identity — a public strength
SIS integration and institutional gradebook	✕ No Not offered	✓ Yes Through Canvas — a public strength
Mandatory training with per-department reporting	✓ Yes Assignments per org unit, completion reporting and CSV export	~ Partial Canvas and Catalog reporting available; verify how per-department completion is modelled
Certificates	✓ Yes Branded certificates with public verification	✓ Yes Certificates of completion
Audit log and data export	✓ Yes Exportable audit log and data export	~ Partial Via Canvas admin tooling — verify scope
LTI 1.3	~ Partial On the roadmap; built on contract for institutional pilots	✓ Yes Native to the Canvas ecosystem
Accessibility conformance documentation	~ Partial Self-assessed ACR at /accessibility/conformance; third-party audit in progress	✓ Yes Instructure publishes VPAT/ACR and runs a credible accessibility programme
SOC 2 report	✕ No Not yet — see /trust for current status	~ Partial Verify current reports with Instructure
Data hosting	✓ Yes EU (Supabase, Frankfurt)	~ Partial Follows the institution's Canvas contract and region — verify
Pricing	✓ Yes Published: from $39/€39 per month; Institution plan from $6/€6 per seat per year	✕ No Custom quote, typically bundled with the Canvas contract

Accessibility: the product is accessible — is the content?

Let us be precise, because this is where lazy comparisons go wrong. Canvas Catalog is not an inaccessible product. Instructure publishes conformance documentation (VPAT/ACR) for its products and runs a credible, long-standing accessibility programme; the Catalog storefront and the Canvas player inherit that work. If your procurement office asks for supplier-grade documentation, Instructure can provide it, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

The gap is one level down. Canvas Catalog does not enforce the accessibility of faculty-authored content. An instructor can publish images without alt text, a lecture recording without captions, or an untagged PDF, and the storefront will happily sell it. To score and remediate that content, institutions add a companion tool — an LMS accessibility checker or overlay — and then run a process of nudging, training and auditing across hundreds of authors. That is a reasonable model for a campus-wide LMS. It is a weak model for a programme whose entire promise is accessibility.

Eduspera moves the check to the point of authoring. Alt text is required on every image upload, not suggested. Automatic captions are generated for every video but carry an explicit review status, and content cannot be published publicly until they have been reviewed. Each course has an accessibility score from 0 to 100 that flags heading structure, contrast, missing descriptions and unreviewed media before you hit publish. On the learner side, the player offers read-aloud (text-to-speech), an audio description track for video, and alternative formats for every lesson — PDF, HTML and Markdown — plus app-wide reading aids for font, spacing, contrast and a focus mode. Learners can also self-declare accessibility needs, behind explicit consent, and receive suggested aids rather than having anything switched on for them. All of this is a product requirement: WCAG 2.2 AA is the bar every component must meet before it ships, as described on our accessibility page.

Two honest caveats. First, Eduspera's conformance report is currently self-assessed — published at /accessibility/conformance — with a third-party audit in progress; Instructure's documentation is more mature on that front. Second, Eduspera's alternative formats stop at PDF, HTML and Markdown: there is no Braille or ePub output yet. If either of those is a hard requirement today, say so early in your evaluation.

Pricing and total cost

The two products are sold in completely different ways, so compare the all-in figure rather than the sticker.

Canvas Catalog has no public list price. It is typically bundled or sold alongside the institution's Canvas contract as a custom quote. That has a practical consequence: if Catalog is already in your Canvas agreement, its marginal cost may be very low, and the real cost of "accessible content" becomes the companion accessibility checker, the staff time to remediate, and the training programme to keep authors compliant.

Eduspera publishes its prices. Self-serve plans are $39/€39 per month for Start, $79/€79 for Grow and $199/€199 for Expand, billed annually. The Institution plan — the one universities actually use — starts at $6/€6 per seat per year, with a $4,900 per year minimum, and includes SSO, per-department reporting, audit log and data export. For a faculty accessibility-training programme covering, say, 800 instructors, the arithmetic is transparent enough to put in a budget request without a sales call.

The fair summary: Canvas Catalog is priced as part of an institutional platform you already own; Eduspera is an additional, published line item for the programmes where enforced accessibility is the requirement. Whether that line item is worth it depends on how much of the remediation work you would otherwise carry yourself.

Where Canvas Catalog fits well

Canvas Catalog is the right choice when the programme lives in Canvas and should stay there. If your continuing-education office wants a public catalogue, enrollment and payment, certificates of completion and reporting that flow into the same SIS and identity your registrar already trusts — and your faculty already build in Canvas — Catalog removes friction rather than adding a system. It is also the safer choice when you need institutional gradebook integration, LTI-based tooling, or when procurement prefers to extend an existing vendor relationship. Pair it with an accessibility checker and a training plan for authors, and it can absolutely deliver accessible non-credit programmes; it just will not enforce that outcome for you.

Where Eduspera fits well

Eduspera fits when accessibility is the deliverable and you want the platform to enforce it rather than merely allow it. That is typically the mandatory faculty accessibility training that has to report completion by department; the accessible non-credit programme aimed at the public, where disabled learners are the audience and the institution's reputation is on the line; and the Disability Services co-design pilot where students with lived experience test the content and their feedback needs to land in the tool, not in a spreadsheet. It also fits European institutions that need EU data hosting (Frankfurt) and an interface in English, Italian and Spanish. If you are considering a pilot, our higher-education pilot page describes the scope, timeline and what we ask of Disability Services.

Complement, not competitor

We want to say this plainly, because it shapes how you should evaluate us: Eduspera does not replace Canvas, and it does not try to. Canvas stays your LMS of record. Eduspera has no SIS integration and no institutional gradebook, and its LTI 1.3 integration is on the roadmap rather than in the box today (we build it on contract for institutional pilots). What Eduspera does is sit next to Canvas: faculty sign in with the same institutional identity through SAML single sign-on, provisioned just-in-time by email domain with InCommon metadata supported; the programme owner authors and publishes in an environment that enforces accessibility; and completion flows back to the institution as per-department reports and CSV exports. A typical arrangement is Canvas Catalog for the broad non-credit catalogue and Eduspera for the specific programmes where enforced accessibility, an audit trail and disabled learners' feedback are the requirement. Our trust page lists what we can and cannot yet document for your security review, including the fact that we do not yet hold a SOC 2 report.

How to choose

Ask three questions. Does the programme need to live inside Canvas? If it needs the institutional gradebook, SIS enrollment or LTI tooling, use Canvas Catalog and add an accessibility checker. Does the programme need accessibility enforced, with evidence? If a compliance officer, a Disability Services director or a public audience will judge the result, Eduspera's enforced authoring, per-course score and reporting are built for exactly that. Can you run both? Most institutions can: Catalog for the catalogue, Eduspera for the accessibility-critical programmes, connected through SSO. If you would like to see your own faculty training or non-credit content running on Eduspera before deciding, we can set up a pilot and walk through it with your Disability Services team on real material — and if anything in this article about Canvas Catalog is wrong, write to [email protected] and we will fix it.