Universal Design Online Content Inspection Tool (UDOIT)

What is UDOIT?

The Universal Design Online Content Inspection Tool, or UDOIT (pronounced, “You Do It”) enables faculty to identify accessibility issues in Webcourses@UCF. It will scan a course, generate a report, and provide resources on how to address common accessibility issues.

The Origin of UDOIT

The Center for Distributed Learning (CDL) partners with the Student Accessibility Services (SAS) office to ensure access to online course content for students with disabilities. Historically, reviewing courses has been a manual, reactive process done by CDL staff. With UCF’s large online presence, a systematic, proactive, instructor-centric approach was devised to identify accessibility issues in online course content.

In late 2013, Instructure (the creators of Canvas, the platform that powers Webcourses@UCF), announced a grant program for anyone in higher education with innovative ideas. CDL applied for, and ultimately won, a $10,000 grant to build UDOIT.

You can learn more about the origin of UDOIT by previewing the 2015 FCTL Summer Conference UDOIT Presentation.

Why have UDOIT?

In June 2022, UCF instituted a Digital Accessibility Policy that covers all digital content, developed, procured, maintained, or used by the University. UDOIT can help faculty strive for full accessibility of their course content by identifying and fixing common issues.

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 the appropriate use of the following:

Excluded Content

Please note: Some items cannot be examined by UDOIT. These include external documents and some videos/audio files for captioning/transcripts. If you have questions or need assistance, contact Webcourses@UCF Support.

Current status

UDOIT is available to all UCF faculty within Webcourses@UCF. The source code is also available to the public under the GPL V3 open source license. You can download the source code at UDOIT’s GitHub page. This means UDOIT is free for use not only at UCF, but also at any institution that uses Canvas by Instructure.

To find out more about the open source release of UDOIT, check out our presentation at InstructureCon 2015.