Teach Online
UDOIT: Course Accessibility Made Easy

"Why should I care about accessibility in my courses?"

Prioritizing accessibility in online courses ensures that all students, regardless of ability, have equal opportunities to succeed, fostering an inclusive and equitable learning environment. By keeping an eye on accessibility, faculty enhance engagement, improve learning outcomes, and demonstrate a commitment to diversity and inclusion.

UDOIT logo

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. UDOIT is easy to use -- get started with the brief 3-minute video, below.

Ensuring accessibility in courses helps protect our institution from potential litigation by complying with legal requirements such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. Proactively addressing accessibility barriers demonstrates our commitment to inclusivity, reducing the risk of discrimination claims. By providing equitable access to all students, we not only foster a more inclusive learning environment but also mitigate legal and reputational risks.

Get started by addressing the three most common accessibility concerns:

PDF's are Problematic!

Please note: The Center for Online Learning & Teaching advises very limited use of PDF's -- and if your PDF documents aren't accessible, they shouldn't be used at all!

PDF's are one of the biggest barrier to accessible online content. The vast majority of PDF's are not set up so that screen readers can read them -- some can't be read at all, and some can't be read in a logical manner.

While UDOIT provides the the opportunity to convert a PDF to a Canvas page in UDOIT, it is not recommended for use just yet. Nonetheless, if you wish to explore and try it out, start here and review this short video start here and review this short video (3 minutes). At this time, the conversion function tends to work best with PDF's that are text only and contain no images.

Again, if your PDF documents aren't accessible, they shouldn't be used at all.

Links Should Contain Text

Because many users of screen readers use links to navigate the page, providing links with no text (or with images that have empty 'alt' attributes and no other readable text) hinders these users.

Take a few minutes to review this video below (7 minutes) to learn best practices and how you can address these issues.

UDOIT: Links and File Names

Using Styles for Document Structure

Bold and Italics are used to emphasize text, whereas headings are used to define the structure of the document. Headings like h1-h6 are extremely useful for non-sighted users to navigate the structure of the page, and formatting a paragraph to just be big or bold, while it might visually look like a heading, does not make it one.

Give a quick review of this video below (7 minutes) to to learn more.

UDOIT: General Page Structure

Questions about these tools?

No need to worry or guess, the Center for Online Learning & Teaching is here to help! Book a meeting with us today and let's walk through this together!