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What are the differences between Cidi Labs UDOIT Advantage and the Open Source UDOIT?

UDOIT Advantage by Cidi Labs builds on UDOIT Open Source, the first course-wide accessibility tool developed exclusively for the Canvas LMS. In 2019, Cidi Labs partnered with the University of Central Florida (UCF) to offer UDOIT as a hosted solution. Since then, Cidi Labs has expanded its functionality with enhanced features, improved performance, ongoing development, and dedicated support, all to advance accessible course design at scale.

Both the Cidi Labs and open-source versions of UDOIT help instructors create more accessible Canvas courses. Each version identifies accessibility issues through a course-level interface and supports remediation while providing built-in guidance to strengthen educators’ understanding of accessibility best practices. Both tools allow users to manually mark issues as resolved when appropriate and include reporting features to track and measure accessibility progress over time. As a commercially-supported solution, UDOIT Advantage by Cidi Labs expands on this foundation with file remediation, customizable scorecards, robust administrator-level reporting, and AI-powered opt-in tools that accelerate the remediation process.

Open Source UDOIT

The open-source version of UDOIT scans Canvas course content and provides an interface for reviewing and resolving accessibility issues within native Canvas content areas (including Pages, Assignments, and Announcements); however, it does not scan or help remediate attached files such as PDFs or Word documents beyond providing an easy way to replace the file with an alternative that has been remediated outside of UDOIT.

As an open-source solution, it requires institutions to self-host and manage the tool, including handling installation, training, and ongoing support—particularly important given Canvas’ frequent release cycle. Updates to the open-source version of UDOIT are released on an as-available basis, driven by UCF and community contributions. 

The tool organizes findings into three categories—“Issues,” “Potential Issues,” and “Suggestions”—to help instructors prioritize remediation efforts while also learning to recognize accessibility best practices. In addition, a course-level reporting dashboard enables instructors to monitor their progress over time, making it easier to track improvements and support broader institutional accessibility goals.

UDOIT Advantage from Cidi Labs

UDOIT Advantage scans Canvas content (Pages, Assignments, Discussions, Classic Quizzes, Syllabi, and Announcements), course files (PDF, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel), and various embedded video types to detect a wide variety of WCAG 2.2 criteria. Users are provided a detailed accessibility scorecard interface that supports multiple, tailored ways to navigate accessibility issues, including the ability to get started by focusing on High Impact areas. UDOIT can filter out unused content and files, ensuring users focus their efforts on materials that are actively used in the course.

To increase efficiency, UDOIT Advantage supports across-item remediation for Canvas content, enabling users to apply a single fix to all related instances of an issue throughout a course. SpeedFIXIT, a feature of UDOIT Advantage, accelerates content improvements by suggesting fixes. Institutions can enable AI-powered generation of alternative text for images to support faster, easier accessibility updates. UDOIT Advantage is designed not only to fix issues, but also to build accessibility knowledge through contextual, in-tool guidance, on-demand training resources, and practical accessibility guides.

In addition to content scanning, UDOIT Advantage evaluates course files and offers multiple pathways to improve document accessibility, including generating alternate formats, converting documents into accessible Canvas pages, and empowering students to generate alternate formats on demand (when enabled by the institution).

For administrators, UDOIT Advantage includes a robust dashboard with detailed reporting across terms and subaccounts, providing visibility into accessibility trends and progress at scale. Institutions can also leverage Cidiscape, Cidi Labs’ free reporting tool, to perform bulk course scans and create custom course batches for more tailored accessibility data and reporting.

Cidi Labs provides hosting, implementation and training services, and regularly-delivered enhancements and updates to UDOIT Advantage through an actively supported release cycle.