UDOIT (Universal Design Online Content Inspection Tool) is a Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) in Canvas that scans your course to search for accessibility issues. UDOIT is valuable, because it helps ensure that online course content is accessible to all students by identifying and providing solutions for common accessibility issues. This guide will cover: 

  • What issues occur and what they mean
  • What steps can be taken towards addressing issues

Where to find UDOIT

You can find the UDOIT Accessibility checker in the left navigation menu under Check Accessibility with UDOIT. If you don’t see it, please reach out to ATD.

Arrow pointing at "Check Accessibility with UDOIT" on left course navigation menu

Most Common File Issues

Missing Title

The title of a PDF or Microsoft Office file is not the file name as you see it when you are opening it in Windows or Mac, but a meta data attribute of the file.

For more information on adding titles, check out:

Missing Headings

Headings formatted only by changing its font size or other text formatting features, rather than setting it as a heading will trigger this error. You will need to go through the document and change what was set to look like headings and use the heading formatting to assign it as a heading. Please see our tutorial on Headings and Accessibility for more information.

Scanned File

This occurs when a PDF of a scanned document or image of a document did not have Optical Character Recognition (OCR) run on it. Without OCR processing run on a file, the text cannot be recognized by text-to-speech readers or be copied and pasted if sections need to be run through a translator. Check out Adobe’s tutorial How to scan and get text from an image with OCR to learn more.

Untagged File

This is an issue associated with PDFs. Blocks of PDF content require tags to inform screen readers what a block of content is supposed to be. For instance, is a block of content a heading (H1, H2, H3), a paragraph, an ordered or unordered list, or a block quote? This issue is prevalent in PDFs that never had tags set when saved such as documents that have only had OCR run on it without tagging content sections. For more information on tagging, see out tutorial PDFs and Accessibility linked above.

What do I do now?

The Office for Digital Accessibility (ODA) created the The 3Rs Framework, which includes: remove, revise and do right first. Below are suggestions for each of the steps relating to documents:

Remove

By starting with remove, you will reduce the amount of files that will need to be remediated. Documents that can be removed include: 

  • any that are no longer necessary because they contain old/obsolete information
  • is a journal article or part of a book that has an available perma-link in the UMN Library
  • has an existing link to a third-party site that can be used instead
  • duplicates of preexisting uploaded documents (UDOIT: Finding and Removing Duplicate Files) 

Files that don’t need to be removed or remediated are ones that are purposefully used for personal use. Some of these files may include development documents, quiz keys, slides with personal notes, etc. As long as the files are stored in the Canvas course files where they are not published or linked in the course content where students can access them, you do not need to worry about removing or remediating those.

Revise

Now that we know what files are still needed, you will want to decide what to do with them. 

7 Core Skills

Knowing how to revise or remediate files requires an understanding of digital accessibility principles that are necessary across all types of document files, be it a web page (HTML), PDF, etc. The Office of Digital Accessibility has the 7 core skills landing page that covers most of the digital accessibility needs. ATD has taken these principles and created tutorials with images, accompaniments and condensed for your needs as a teacher working in Canvas. Please check out the tutorials we have that cover some the core-skills that should used when making documents and Canvas pages accessible:

File Type Considerations

Depending on the file type you want to remediate, here are some considerations:

PDFs

As mentioned in our article PDFs and Accessibility (linked above), PDFs are by far the most problematic in regards to accessibility when it comes to remediating them. It requires a significant amount of time and effort to remediate compared to web pages or other formats. The Office for Digital Accessibility and ATD strongly advises against using PDFs. So what can you do if you have a PDF?

Microsoft Office Suite Files

Files for Microsoft Word (docx/doc), PowerPoint (pptx/ppt), and Excel (xlsx/xls) also have digital accessibility requirements. Most of them relate to using headings properly. Word, PowerPoint and Excel offer a built-in accessibility checker that scans the documents indicating problem areas with suggestions for fixes. Check out the article Improve accessibility with the Accessibility Checker to learn more about how to use it. 

Google Suite Files (Grackle Docs)

Google Docs, Slides and Spreadsheets have similar needs to Microsoft Office Files. The Google Suite has some tools for accessibility, but they are not as robust as the Accessibility Checker for Microsoft Office. To make checking accessibility in Google Docs, Slides and Spreadsheets easier, the UMN has purchased Grackle Docs. To learn more about setting it up and how to use it, please check out the UMN IT article Google Drive: Use GrackleDocs Accessibility Checker.

Quick Way to Replace Remediated Files in Canvas Using UDOIT

To get a file to remediate or to replace a remediated file, rather than searching for every instance in the course, UDOIT has a great feature to replace files. Check out our tutorial UDOIT: How to Download and Replace Files.

Do Right First

Knowing the digital accessibility requirements for documents allows you to make better decisions in regards to the content you will add to your course in the future and how it is added. As long as you follow the 7 core skills when making documents or procure them from other locations (that may or may not make them accessible), maintenance on file accessibility going forward will be greatly reduced for everyone working on your online course content.

If you have any more questions about this tutorial, UDOIT, Document Accessibility, or file types not mentioned in this tutorial, please feel free to reach out to ATD through the CCAPS-ATD Learning Management Assistance form.