When preparing your Canvas courses for accessibility scanning with UDOIT, it's essential to understand how unused and unpublished content can affect your course score and why you should proactively manage this content as needed.
What Are "Unused" and "Unpublished" Content?
- Unused Content: These are files, pages, assignments, or materials in your course that are not linked or referenced anywhere students would access them. Examples include files uploaded but never inserted into a module or page.
- Unpublished Content: There are items present in your course but marked as "Unpublished," making them invisible to students, even if linked somewhere in a course.
How UDOIT Handles Unused and Unpublished Content
UDOIT scans all content in your course by default - including used/unused and published/unpublished items. This means even files or pages that students cannot see or access (because they're unused or unpublished) are still scanned by UDOIT for accessibility issues and therefore, by default, calculated into a course's overall score.
Reasons to Hide Unused or Unpublished Content in UDOIT
- Improves Score Accuracy: Hiding these items focuses the accessibility scan on student-facing content, preventing errors in hidden or irrelevant material from lowering your score.
- Reduces Remediation Workload: With unused or unpublished content hidden, fewer issues are flagged, allowing instructors to concentrate their efforts on improving content that actively impacts students.
Reasons to Not Hide Unused or Unpublished Content in UDOIT
- Ensures Long-Term Accessibility: Scanning all content - even unpublished or unused - helps ensure that materials meet accessibility standards before they are published or used in a course.
- Provides Comprehensive Reporting: Including all content gives admins a full view of course accessibility, which is valuable for ensuring users are maintaining accessibility standards within their courses and tracking accessibility progress over time.
Summary
Choosing whether to hide unused and unpublished content during UDOIT scans is about balancing focused remediation on student-facing materials with maintaining long-term accessibility standards. Hiding these items provides a clearer, more actionable accessibility score based on what students actually encounter in a course, while not hiding them provides a fuller picture that supports proactive compliance to accessibility standards within your users' courses.
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