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 created by the Center for Distributed Learning (CDL) at the University of Central Florida (CDL)
What does it do?
UDOIT will identify “errors” and provide “suggestions” in the following areas of your course:
To run UDOIT in your course, click on the UDOIT tab in your course’s navigation. If you do not see the UDOIT tab in your course’s navigation, click on your course’s “Settings”, then “Navigation”. Drag and drop the UDOIT tab into the top section of the screen, then scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the “Save” button. UDOIT will then appear in your course’s navigation for you as the instructor.
You can choose to run reports on the entire course or just specific types of content (like assignments). You can also choose to just scan for errors or just suggestions or both. You can scan unpublished courses as well.
Ally is a tool that integrates into Canvas and works to support content creators ensure that the materials they are creating and using are accessible.
Currently, Ally scans materials that have been uploaded into Canvas courses (documents, images) and displays a little gauge to let the author know if the item has any accessibility issues. By clicking on the gauge, course editors can review the issues.
Note: Ally is still undergoing some development, so new features may be available shortly. Eventually, it will also inform you of accessibility barriers on your Canvas pages.
icons, just the course’s instructor. Ally will score your images and files automatically and the instructor will see a gauge next to each of these items. The gauge will appear as dark green, green, yellow or red based on the Ally score, indicating whether the item needs to be worked on or not. Dark green (perfect) indicates that the item is accessible, green (high) indicates that the item is good, but just needs a small adjustment. Yellow (medium) indicates that some work needs to be done on the item for it to be accessible and red (low) indicates that the image is not accessible at all.
When you click on the gauge, Ally will show you the item’s score and let you know if and what needs to be adjusted. It will give you suggestions as to how to fix the item in question and will let you fix the item directly in Ally if you prefer.
Some of the most common accessibility issues that an instructor might encounter are:
Untagged PDFs,
Images without alternative text
Documents without headers
Another Ally feature is providing alternative formats for uploaded documents . To view/access these formats, you click on the little triangle at the end of the file name. Currently, the following formats seem to be the ones provided:
Tagged PDF version
OCR'd PDF
HTML version
ePub version
Electronic braille version
Audio
Ally’s Accessibility Report
Ally has an accessibility report feature that can be added to the course navigation. Ally’s course accessibility report includes Overview and Content tabs so that you can get the big picture as well as specific details about the accessibility of your digital course content.
The Overview tab shows the accessibility score for the course, course content grouped by content type, and a list of all issues identified in the course. The Content tab shows you the content with accessibility issues. The accessibility report can also assist in determining which content you want to fix first, the easiest to fix or the items with the lowest accessibility score.
Canvas’s accessibility checker only checks the accessibility of content in the Rich Content Editor.
Canvas’s accessibility Checker verifies the following accessibility rules:
Adjacent links: Adjacent links with the same URL should be a single link. This rule verifies link errors where the link text may include spaces and break the link into multiple links.
Heading paragraphs: Headings should not contain more than 120 characters.
Image alt text: Images should include an alt attribute describing the image content.
Image alt filename: Image filenames should not be used as the alt attribute describing the image content. Currently, files uploaded directly to Canvas create a redirect that does not properly verify image filenames.
Image alt length: Alt attribute text should contain fewer than 120 characters.
Large text contrast: Text larger than 18pt (or bold 14pt) should display a minimum contrast ratio of 3:1.
Lists: Lists should be formatted as lists.
Sequential headings: Heading levels should not be skipped (e.g. H2 to H4). However, the tool does not check if the first header starts with H2 or whether the headings are sequential with the rest of the content in the page. Tables do not begin with H1, which is designated for the page title.
Small text contrast: Text smaller than 18pt (or bold 14pt) should display a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1.
Table captions: Tables should include a caption describing the contents of the table.
Table header scope: Table headers should specify scope and the appropriate structure.
Table header: Tables should include at least one header.
DesignPLUS has its own accessibility checker designed to check content within the DesignPLUS “wrapper”. DesignPLUS’s accessibility tools check for the following in content created with DesignPLUS:
Headings -The Headings tool looks at the headings on a page for proper order.
Image Check- The Link Check tool looks at the Images on a page for the presence of alt text. You can edit an image's alt text with this tool.
Link Check- The Link Check tool lists all of the links on a page to make sure they make sense out of context.
From the descriptions of the accessibility tools above, you may have noticed that each tool doesn’t do quite the same thing. You may have to use two tools together to check all of your content within your Canvas courses. The following will help you have a better understanding of which tools to use together and which tools to use for specific content.
Ally and UDOIT work well together as they one tool does what the other tool does not: Ally scans documents and UDOIT checks everything else.
Ally and the Canvas Accessibility checker also work well together, as one will check your Rich Content Editor Content and the other will check any files that you have embedded in your course. However, at this time UDOIT is a more robust tool for checking content and will cover more aspects of your course.
DesignPLUS’s accessibility checker should only be used on content that has been created using DesignPLUS. Please be aware that DesignPLUS may interfere with the accuracy of other accessibility checkers.
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