ReadSpeaker + Cidi Labs UDOIT = Seamlessly Accessible Canvas Courses

If you’re looking for tools that will help make your digital educational content more accessible for students with disabilities, you might have come across UDOIT by Cidi Labs in your research, or perhaps you’ve encountered our text-to-speech (TTS) engine here at ReadSpeaker.

Both ReadSpeaker and Cidi Labs UDOIT aim to enhance accessibility for students in digital learning environments, but we go about it in very different ways.

Let’s break down the differences between ReadSpeaker and Cidi Labs UDOIT, so you can decide which one you need to use—or if using both together might be your best solution.

Making Your Digital Content Accessible With ReadSpeaker and Cidi Labs UDOIT

ReadSpeaker and UDOIT fulfill very different purposes in the digital accessibility landscape.

What is Cidi Labs UDOIT?

Cidi Labs UDOIT is an open source accessibility checker that works within the Canvas LMS.

Created by educators at the University of Central Florida, UDOIT reviews online course material and provides guidance on what changes to make to ensure students with low vision or other disabilities can easily use and understand them.

UDOIT is a great tool to use if you’re creating online Canvas lessons. You won’t have to worry that your students with disabilities might miss something important, because UDOIT will flag the accessibility issues you need to change to give them the best learning experience.

It may point out problems such as low color contrast, missing table or section headers, a lack of tagging in PDFs, or incomplete or missing alt text for images you’ve uploaded using Cidi Labs DesignPLUS within Canvas.

It can also generate alternate formats such as Canvas pages, HTML documents, ePubs, MP3 files, auto-tagged PDFs, and text documents. This maximizes the chances that your students will find a format that works with their accessibility software of choice.

Better still, UDOIT’s inspection tool is relatively inexpensive compared to other accessibility checkers, but it doesn’t sacrifice functionality to achieve the lower price tag.

In fact, it can actually make your job as an educator easier since it offers tutorials, a user guide for best practices, a detailed knowledge base with an extensive FAQ section, and plenty of additional resources you can use while building your courses.

The primary limitation: UDOIT only works with course design tools inside Canvas. If you work within an external site, you’ll have to look for a different accessibility checker to handle that content separately. Unfortunately, UDOIT is also limited to the English language, and its detection rate for accessibility errors isn’t always 100%. You may encounter some false positives or missed items from time to time.

What makes ReadSpeaker a crucial accessibility tool?

ReadSpeaker provides students with an immersive audio learning experience.

ReadSpeaker is first and foremost a text-to-speech (TTS) solution that reads digital content out loud to users who need some audio assistance with their work or school lessons. It also provides learning and study tools in the form of page masks, highlighting, and the ability to change the appearance of text.

High-quality text-to-speech is helpful for visually impaired learners, of course, but it’s also a great solution for students with dyslexia, ADHD, learning disorders, or anyone who likes to listen to their lessons out loud while they work.

In other words, ReadSpeaker fills in the gaps that will inevitably remain after UDOIT checks.

That’s because ReadSpeaker provides students with the ability to listen to the course content out loud, regardless of whether that content has been optimized by an accessibility checker.

Our tool allows users to select text for playback, pause and repeat audio selections, save customized terms in the pronunciation library, and adjust the speed and voice of the automated reader, among other features.

ReadSpeaker works in your students’ web browsers, on their Android or Apple phones, within their Mac or Windows operating systems, or within the school’s learning management system (LMS). There’s no limitation on where students can work; just install the correct software version—WebReader, DocReader, or TextAid—and your students can have all their lessons spoken aloud whenever and wherever they need it.

When in doubt, use both tools together.

ReadSpeaker and UDOIT by Cidi Labs are complementary tools.

UDOIT is used by teachers to create accessible lessons. ReadSpeaker is used by learners to create the ideal learning experience.

We recommend that you use UDOIT and ReadSpeaker together to make sure your educational materials are accessible for everyone in your digital classroom.