UDOIT Information

[tr_jbates]

What is UDOIT?

The Universal Design Online content Inspection Tool, or UDOIT (pronounced, “You Do It”) enables faculty to identify accessibility issues in their Canvas course content. It will scan a course, generate a report, and provide resources on how to address common accessibility issues.  It was originally created by the Center for Distributed Learning (CDL) at the University of Central Florida (CDL), and has received significant contributions from many organizations, especially Cidi Labs.

What does it do?

UDOIT will identify “errors” and provide “suggestions” in the following areas of your course:

• Announcements
• Assignments
• Discussions
• Files (i.e., .html files)
• Pages
• Syllabus
• Module URLs

It will check for many different accessibility issues, including:

• Use of headings in page structure
• Alternative text for images
• Table headers
• Color contrast
• Descriptive link text
• Video captions

Please note: some items cannot be examined by UDOIT. These include external documents and some videos/audio files for captioning/transcripts.

More Information

Instructors:

• If your institution is already using UDOIT with Canvas, it can be enabled via your Canvas course settings.
• For more information about UDOIT, visit our UDOIT information page.

Developers/LMS Admins/IT Staff:

If you are interested in downloading and installing UDOIT, visit the GitHub project.  If you would like to join the community of other users and developers, please join the UCF Open Source Slack organization.

[Sylvia_Ami]

@tr_jbates I have a question regarding the check for images marked as decorative. What is the UDOIT check looking for? In my experience, if the image tag has alt="", UDOIT will flag this as a suggestion: "Image elements should have an 'alt' attribute." When I use UDOIT to mark the image as decorative, UDOIT adds the following inside the image tag: data-decorative="true"

When a user marks an image as decorative in the Canvas RCE or using the Canvas Accessibility Checker, only the alt="" attribute is added. The data-decorative attribute is not added.

To resolve this, would this be an Instructure or UDOIT request?

[tr_jbates]

@Sylvia_Ami I see what you mean.  Canvas used to put data-decorative="true" on an image if you checked the "Decorative Image" checkbox.  Now, it appears that it puts role="presentation", which is a better solution to the problem.  I'm not sure when this change occurred, but we evidently missed it.  Thank you for reporting it!  I have created Issue #624 to address this in a future version of UDOIT.

[Sylvia_Ami]

@tr_jbates Thanks for addressing this issue. At first I thought I was in an alternate universe. Then I looked back at a case I submitted in June 2020 to Instructure related to alt text. That's the last time I know for sure that the data-decorative="true" attribute was included.