Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Auditor – Free Accessibility Checklist, No Sign-Up

Accessible courses help every student, not just students with accommodations. This free UDL auditor takes your material list and returns the accessibility checks each item needs: captions for video, alt text for images, tagged text for PDFs. No sign-up. The audit habit matters more than any single fix. A course checked once stays accessible for a term; a course checked as it grows stays accessible for years, because every new video, image, and document enters the course already fixed.

What this tool does

Universal Design for Learning means building courses that work for many learners from the start, instead of fixing barriers one student at a time. The most common barriers are also the most fixable: uncaptioned video, images without alt text, and scanned PDFs a screen reader cannot read.

This tool turns a plain material list into a fix list. Paste what the course contains, and each item gets its checks spelled out, with a total count of work remaining.

Accessibility work also compounds. A captioned video library built this year serves next year, and alt text written once travels with the image wherever it is reused. The audit is the inventory step that turns a vague worry into a finite, finishable list.

How to use it

Paste one course material per line, such as Lecture video or PDF handout.
Click the audit button.
Work through the checks, starting with video captions and image alt text.
Re-run the audit when new materials are added.

The tool matches keywords like video, PDF, image, and quiz. Name materials clearly: “Week 3 diagram image” audits better than “Week 3 file”.

Worked example

A teacher audits three items: Lecture video, PDF handout, Diagram image. The tool returns captions plus transcript for the video, tagged text for the PDF, and alt text plus a text description for the diagram: four checks in total.

Two hours of fixes later, the course works for a deaf student, a blind student, and a student studying on a phone with the sound off. That is UDL working.

A department audits a shared course with forty materials and finds twenty-three checks. Split across four teachers, that is six fixes each, done in one afternoon. The course then passes its formal review with no findings, which never happens to unaudited courses.

Honest limits

Keyword matching catches common gaps, not every barrier. Color contrast, reading order, and keyboard traps need human checks. Treat this audit as a starting list, not a certification.

Tips

Caption videos at upload time, not at the end of term. Retrofitting captions takes ten times longer than doing them while the material is fresh.

Common mistakes

The most common mistake is treating accessibility as a separate project done at the end. End-of-term fixes compete with grading and always lose. Build the checks into the material creation step: caption on upload, alt text on insert, tagged export on save.

How it fits your week

Audit new materials the week you create them, and audit the whole course once per term. Five minutes of auditing per week prevents the forty-item backlog that makes teachers dread accessibility altogether.

Accessibility is often framed as compliance, and compliance framing makes it feel like a burden. The better frame is audience: captions serve the student on a noisy bus, alt text serves the student whose image failed to load, and tagged PDFs serve everyone who searches inside a document. UDL expands the audience of every material you make, which is a teaching goal, not a legal chore. The auditor turns that goal into a list, and lists get finished. Start with the biggest items, video and images, fix them at creation time from now on, and re-audit each term. A course that grows accessible stays accessible, and its teacher never faces the forty-item backlog again.

FAQ

Does this replace my institution accessibility review?
No. It prepares you for it. Fixing the flagged items first means the formal review finds fewer problems and finishes faster.

Is alt text really that important?
Yes. Without it, a screen reader announces only “image”, and the student misses the content entirely. One sentence of alt text is the difference between access and exclusion.

Embed this tool on your website — free

Copy the code below to add this working tool to your own page. A small credit link stays with it — that’s all we ask.