UDOIT

Biola uses the UDOIT tool to help faculty identify accessibility issues in their Canvas courses. We want to ensure access to online course content for students with disabilities. UDOIT stands for Universal Design Online content Inspection Tool, pronounced, "You Do It."

In every Canvas course, teachers will see a link to UDOIT in the left hand navigation menu:

UDOIT in navigation menu

Next, you will need to click "Authorize" to allow UDOIT to access your account.

Screen shot - Authorize UDOIT

Then choose which sections of your Canvas course you wish to scan (we recommend the default, with is "All"). Click the green button to begin the process:

Run Scanner button

When the scan finishes, UDOIT will present you with a list of errors and suggestions. The list of accessibility errors checked includes:

  • Links should contain text
  • No Alternative Text found
  • Alternative Text should not be the image filename
  • Alternative Text is more than 100 characters
  • Alt text for all img elements used as source anchors should not be empty
  • No table headers found
  • No row or column scopes declarations found in headers of the table
  • Insufficient text color contrast with the background
  • Multimedia objects should have text equivalents (e.g., transcripts).

In addition, UDOIT checks for the following items and lists them as "suggestions":

  • Avoid the use of animated GIF’s
  • Synchronized captions should be provided for prerecorded web-based video
  • Link text should be descriptive
  • The text equivalents (e.g., transcripts and/or captions) for embedded content should update when content changes.
  • Headings should contain text
  • Consider adding headings to your document to create more structure
  • Avoid using styles for document structure
  • Avoid using color alone for emphasis

For most errors and suggestions, UDOIT provides a button which allows you to fix the problem. For example, if the Alternate Text for an image is just the file name, you will see this error:

Example UDOIT Error screen shot

Click "View the source of this issue" to see the image (it will appear in-line, in the message). Next, click the green "U FIX IT!" button and you can type in a new Alt Text for that image.

For more details and a demonstration video, see the UDOIT home page at https://online.ucf.edu/teach-online/resources/udoit/