Creating, understanding, and addressing your UDOIT report

The Universal Design Online Content Inspection Tool, or UDOIT (pronounced "You Do It”), is a tool in Canvas designed to identify digital accessibility issues within your course and provide guidance to correct them. Follow along to learn how to use UDOIT.

Creating your UDOIT report

STRONGLY RECOMMENDED: Before using UDOIT to scan your Canvas site, go through Files and delete redundant or unnecessary files. This will allow the scan to run more efficiently.

1. Select UDOIT  in your Canvas Navigation Menu (See Fig. 1). If this is the first time you are accessing UDOIT, you will be asked to authenticate your account. If this does not work the first time, try refreshing your browser window.
   Note: Students do not see UDOIT in their course navigation, nor can they access any of your reports.
   
   Figure 1: UDOIT in the Canvas Navigation Menu
2. You will see a welcome screen (if you have not opted out) that includes an overview of UDOIT. UDOIT will automatically begin scanning your course for accessibility issues, and will generate a report upon completion (See Fig. 2).
   
   Figure 2: UDOIT welcome screen and status bar
3. When the report is complete, select Continue.

Understanding your UDOIT report

After a scan, the UDOIT Home page provides summary information to help you keep track of the number of issues that have been found, as well as how many have been addressed (See Fig. 3). This summary is split into:

• Content: Canvas content such as Pages, Assignments, Announcements, Discussions, Quizzes, HTML Files, and the Canvas Syllabus.
• Files: Uploaded Word documents, PowerPoint files, and PDFs.

 Figure 3: UDOIT homepage

Issues within Canvas are categorized as Errors and Suggestions (See Fig. 4). These categories reflect the degree to which UDOIT’s vendor is confident of accurately identifying the issue, not their importance. Errors are issues flagged with a high degree of confidence, while Suggestion” are flagged with a lower degree of confidence but still require attention.

In other words, if UDOIT flags an issue, you need to check it and resolve it—whether it is an error or a suggestion. 

See What Does UDOIT Look For? for descriptions of all possible errors and suggestions.

UDOIT will also identify some issues with files. See Using UDOIT Advantage to Address Accessibility Barriers in Course Files to learn more.

Figure 4: Example section of a report from UDOIT

Errors you are likely to encounter include:

• Headings - must contain text and cannot skip levels
• Color - insufficient contrast between text and background
• Links - must contain text; for example, do not just make an image a link to another resource unless you have also provided alternative text for the image. This can also occur when linked text is deleted but the code is not completely removed from the page.
• Alternative text - should not be empty and should not be just the image filename (which is the Canvas default), but should not contain more than 150 characters.
• Tables - must have headers and must define row and column scope for header

Suggestions can include these:

• Headings - Should be used in longer documents to provide structure. To achieve this, you can create an outline of your document and use that to determine appropriate heading levels.
• Links - Should be descriptive, not a file name, URL, or click here. 

Correct: Visit the University of Missouri System to find out more...
Incorrect: Visit https://www.umsystem.edu/ to find out more...
Incorrect: Click here to visit the University of Missouri System website....

• Color - Do not use color alone for emphasis; add bold, italics, or an icon to call attention to your content.
• Content length - Consider splitting content longer than 3,000 words onto multiple pages.

Filtering issues in your UDOIT report

To begin addressing these issues, you have three options:

1. Select one of the errors or suggestions to begin reviewing each incidence (See Fig. 4).
2. Select UFIXIT at the top of the page to view and filter all issues (See Fig. 5). You can access filtering options from UFIXIT, such as the ability to hide unpublished content, allowing you to focus on the material in your site that is available to students.
   
   Figure 5: UFIXIT in the UDOIT top navigation menu
3. Select Ways to Get Started? to view the filtering options (See Fig. 6).
   
   Figure 5: Filter options
   • Easiest to fix—this is subjective and not necessarily helpful.
   • Errors only—but remember, the difference between errors and suggestions is UDOIT’s confidence that it has accurately identified an accessibility barrier, not that suggestions are less important to fix.
   • All open issues
   • By issue type
   • By content type—for example, only Pages, or only Assignments.
   • By impact type—identifying issues that affect students with visual disabilities, hearing impairments, cognitive disabilities, or motor disabilities.

In any option you choose, when viewing items to review, a list will appear showing all of the issues that are present within your course. The following icons will appear, indicating the status of those issues.

Addressing issues in your UDOIT report

1. Select Review to address an issue. From the window that appears, you will be able to see details about the error or suggestion and where it occurs in the course (See Fig. 7). 
   
   Figure 7: Review of an issue in UDOIT
2. In many cases, you can fix the issue within the issue detail directly in the window and select Save.
3. In some cases, an issue cannot be fixed within UDOIT, but you can mark the issue as Resolved once you have addressed it outside of UDOIT (for example, if you opened the page to find and address the issue) and/or determined it is no longer an issue.
4. Select Next Issue to address another accessibility issue in your course.

Canvas campus and vendor resources