What Is UDOIT and How to Get a 100% Accessibility Score in Canvas

By Maxa Updated May 2026 8 min read

UDOIT is the accessibility scanner most universities run against your Canvas course before it goes live. Get flagged, and you get a remediation list. Score 100%, and you get to focus on teaching. Here's the complete teacher's guide to what UDOIT scans, what its score actually means, and the 6-step playbook to take any course from 70% to 100%.

What is UDOIT?

UDOIT stands for Universal Design Online content Inspection Tool. It's an open-source scanner originally built by the University of Central Florida that's now used by hundreds of universities (including the entire California State University system) to check Canvas course content against WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards.

UDOIT runs from inside Canvas — usually it's listed in your left-hand course navigation as "UDOIT" or "Accessibility." Click it, hit Scan This Course, and a few minutes later you get a report with two categories:

Errors — accessibility violations that fail WCAG outright. These count against your score.
Suggestions — items UDOIT can't be 100% sure about that need human review.

What does the UDOIT score actually mean?

The UDOIT percentage score is the ratio of clean items to total scanned items. If your course has 1,000 scanned items (each image, link, heading, etc. counts as one item) and 50 of them have errors, your score is 95%.

Most institutions don't have a hard cutoff — but the practical reality is:

Below 85%: instructional designer comes knocking
85–95%: "good enough" for most departments but may be flagged in audits
95–99%: you're cleared
100%: you're a unicorn

What does UDOIT check for?

UDOIT scans every Canvas page, syllabus, discussion, assignment, quiz, and file in your course. The 15 most common errors:

Images without alt text
Alt text that's empty or just the filename
Alt text that's too long (over 150 chars)
Alt text starting with "image of…"
Tables without header rows
Documents missing a language attribute
PDF files that aren't tagged
Links with vague text ("click here", "more")
Empty links
Iframe embeds (videos) without a title
Heading order issues (H1 → H3, skipping H2)
Visually-styled "fake headings" (bold large paragraphs)
Low color contrast text
Bold/italic without semantic emphasis tags
Generic spreadsheet sheet names ("Sheet1")

The 6-step playbook to a 100% UDOIT score

Step 1: Run the initial scan

In Canvas, click UDOIT in your course navigation → Scan This Course. Wait 2–10 minutes depending on course size. Read the report.

Step 2: Tackle alt text first (usually the biggest chunk)

Alt text errors are typically 40–60% of all UDOIT errors. UDOIT lets you fix many of them inline — click an image error, type alt text, save. You don't have to leave the report.

For images in uploaded files (Word, PowerPoint, PDF), you'll need to fix them in the source file, then re-upload. See our guide on adding alt text in Word.

Step 3: Fix heading order in pages

Open any flagged Canvas page → click Edit → use the Rich Content Editor's heading dropdown. Make sure:

The page title is implicitly H1 — don't add another H1.
Section headings are H2.
Subsections are H3.
Never skip a level (no H2 followed directly by H4).
Never use "Bold + Large font" to fake a heading — use the real Heading style.

Step 4: Replace "click here" link text

Find every "click here", "more", "this link", or raw URL ("https://canvas.cpp.edu/courses/12345..."). Replace with descriptive text that says where the link goes: "Course syllabus", "Office hours sign-up", "Week 3 readings."

Step 5: Tag your PDFs

UDOIT will flag every untagged PDF in your course. Untagged PDFs are just images of text to a screen reader — totally inaccessible.

If you have Adobe Acrobat Pro: open the PDF → Tools → Accessibility → Autotag Document → Save.

If you don't: drop the PDF into the Maxademics Canvas Fixer — it tags PDFs automatically using LibreOffice + qpdf.

Step 6: Add iframe titles to embedded videos

Every embedded YouTube, Vimeo, or Panopto video shows up in UDOIT as an iframe. Without a title attribute, screen readers just say "frame" — students don't know what's inside.

In Canvas, edit the page → switch to HTML view → find each <iframe> tag → add title="YouTube video about cell division" (or whatever describes the content).

The "I already did all that and it's still 92%" problem

UDOIT often flags items it can't auto-evaluate as suggestions rather than errors. These don't count against your score, but they do clutter the report. Common ones:

Decorative images marked as decorative but without empty alt — UDOIT wants alt=""
Tables with header rows that UDOIT can't 100% confirm
Complex PDF tag trees that UDOIT can't fully validate

For these, click the item → read what UDOIT specifically flags → mark it as reviewed (UDOIT has a "review and dismiss" option for items you've manually verified).

⚠ The biggest UDOIT score killer: copy-paste from Word

When you copy content from a Word document and paste it into a Canvas page, Word's formatting (font, color, fake headings) often gets baked in as inline styles. Those inline styles fail UDOIT's contrast and heading checks.

Fix: instead of copy-paste, use Canvas's "Paste as Plain Text" (Cmd+Shift+V on Mac, Ctrl+Shift+V on Windows). Then apply proper heading styles using the Canvas editor.

Skip the manual fixes — let the Maxademics Fixer do them

Export your Canvas course as a .imscc file, drop it into the Fixer. We add alt text, fix heading order, tag PDFs, replace vague link text, and add iframe titles. Return a cleaned .imscc you can re-import. Free.

Open the free Fixer →

How to export your Canvas course for the Fixer

In Canvas, click Settings (gear icon) in your course navigation.
Scroll down to Export Course Content.
Choose Course.
Click Create Export.
Wait. You'll get an email or notification when it's ready (~2–15 minutes for typical courses).
Download the .imscc file.
Drop it into fix.maxademics.com. Wait for the cleaned file.
Import the cleaned _a11y.imscc file into a new empty Canvas course shell (don't re-import into the original to avoid duplicate pages).
Re-run UDOIT in the new course. Watch the score jump.

What 100% gets you (beyond the green checkmark)

Every accessibility fix you make is also an instructional design improvement:

Real headings make pages skimmable for ALL students, not just screen reader users.
Descriptive link text reduces cognitive load — students immediately know where each link goes.
Alt text on charts doubles as caption text — useful for students printing slides.
Captioned videos get watched by students in noisy environments, ESL learners, and the 80% of YouTube viewers who watch on mute.

The 100% score is a side effect of doing what good teaching demands anyway.

References

Maxa teaches food science at Cal Poly Pomona and built Maxademics after years of fighting Canvas accessibility audits. The Canvas Accessibility Fixer is free and used by teachers nationwide.