Canvas - Comparing Canvas Accessibility Checkers [UW-Madison]

There are two accessibility tools available in Canvas at UW-Madison:

• UDOIT
• Canvas Accessibility Checker in the Rich Content Editor (RCE)

UDOIT

The UDOIT Accessibility Checker expands accessibility checks beyond the text added via the rich text editor, and also includes files uploaded to Canvas courses. UDOIT Advantage allows you to: 

• Rapidly scan PDF and Word files in a course to detect potential accessibility issues such as scanned or untagged PDFs or outdated Word document formats.

• View, sort, and filter all files in a course by content type, accessibility issue or other filters.

• Auto-generate alternate formats of a file including web page (HTML), Audio File (MP3), ePUB Digital Book, Plain Text, and Auto Tagged PDF.

• Take actions to remediate a course file to improve accessibility such as replacing the file with a UDOIT-generated Canvas page, uploading a more accessible file, or deleting the file from the course – all within the UDOIT interface.

For more information, please see UDOIT - Getting Started [UW-Madison]

Canvas Accessibility Checker in the Rich Content Editor (RCE)

The Rich Content Editor includes an accessibility tool that detects common accessibility errors within the editor. You can use the Accessibility Checker to design course content while considering accessibility attributes. This tool only verifies content created within the Rich Content Editor. You may use other accessibility tools to verify additional content in Canvas

Instructure recently announced a new accessibility checker called the Canvas Course Accessibility Checker. At a future date, Learn@UW will announce more details about this checker, including the timeline for its availability at UW-Madison.UDOIT - Getting Started [UW-Madison]

The Canvas Accessibility Checker in the Rich Content Editor (RCE)

This checker will only check content currently being edited in the Rich Content Editor.

UDOIT

Highlights barriers in the following areas of a course:

• Announcements
• Assignments
• Classic Quiz Instructions
• Discussions
• Pages
• Syllabus
• Module URLs
• Files (Excel, PDF, PowerPoint, Word)

To ensure the accurate framing of our accessibility efforts, sponsors should be aware of the specific content types that UDOIT does not or only partially scans.

• Limited Scope for Quizzes: UDOIT currently does not scan classic quiz questions or question banks. It only scans the quiz description field. It also does not scan New Quizzes at this time. Course content stored exclusively in these formats is not factored into the accessibility score.
• Limited Document Scanning: While UDOIT scans uploaded files (PDFs, Word, PPT, Excel), the checks are often focused on basic structural integrity and file format issues (e.g., looking for scanned, image-only PDFs, or outdated XLS formats). It does not perform a comprehensive, deep structural check of document accessibility. For example, an Excel file may pass UDOIT's check if it is in the correct format, but still be highly inaccessible due to complex, untagged, or merged cells.
• Canvas Rich Content Editor does not scan files. To see what UDOIT scans for and in what supported files, please see the files section of UDOIT User Guide.
• Need for Manual Review: Because a 100% score is only 100% compliance on the content and file properties UDOIT scans, course content heavily reliant on complex files (e.g., data-heavy PDFs, detailed spreadsheets) requires dedicated manual review to achieve true compliance.

Links

Image Alternate Text

Audio/Video

Headings

Tables

Color and Design

Miscellaneous