E60: UDOIT, Accessibility, and Higher Ed Innovation: A Conversation with Morgan Busch, CPACC

In this episode of United in Accessibility Morgan Bush, a software engineer at the University of Central Florida (UCF), discussed his journey in digital accessibility. He highlighted his work on the UDOIT project, an open-source accessibility checker for Canvas, which was upgraded to IBM Equal Access. Bush emphasized the importance of proactive accessibility measures and noted challenges in faculty adoption, with less than half using the tool, and plans to make it more accessible for smaller institutions. Bush received the 2025 IAAP Impact Award for his contributions.

Transcript

Speaker  00:03

Welcome to the IAAP United in Accessibility podcast. Today, we're honored to welcome Morgan Busch, a software engineer whose work is reshaping how educators understand and implement digital accessibility. Morgan brings a unique mix of technical expertise, user centered design and hands on experience in higher education. As lead programmer and designer at the University of Central Florida, he strengthened UDOIT, the Open-Source accessibility Checker used across campuses nationwide, and led its major upgrade to IBM Equal Access. Morgan's leadership earned him the 2025 IAAP Impact Award recognizing his contributions to accessibility and his commitment to helping educators create meaningful, lasting improvements in their digital classrooms. Today, we explore his journey, his work on UDOIT, and his vision for the future of Accessible Learning Technology on the United in Accessibility podcast.

Sam Evans  01:07

Hello. This is Sam Evans with IAAP, the International Association of Accessibility Professionals, and we are here today on our podcast, United in Accessibility. I'm really excited to get a chance today to talk with and meet with Morgan Busch for the first time for me. Morgan holds our certification, our Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies. Morgan works at the University of Central Florida and has some really great background and has received one of our 2025 Impact Awards. I first want to invite Morgan to make their introduction for themselves, and then we'll get into our discussion to learn more about Morgan's work and some really exciting things that they're generating at UCF.

Morgan Busch  01:49

Thank you so much, Sam. I really appreciate it. Again, Morgan Bush, pronouns are he/him. I've been a software engineer for quite a while. Before that, I was a teacher, taught at a very small private school, middle and high school age students, and then went back for a master's degree in computer science, and since then, have been involved in education one way or another. First at BYU out in Utah, and now at UCF here in Central Florida. And my job has essentially been making academic technology, tools to make life better for students and for teachers. For me, that's just been the dream job, is putting the education where my passion is with something that I really enjoy doing. I just really enjoy my work every day. So that's been fun and been working for the last, oh gosh, year and a half now, specifically on the UDOIT project, which has been a lot of fun, and it helped a lot of people with accessibility in the classroom.

Sam Evans  02:44

I think we're going to talk about that more in depth, particularly in higher ed. It's a unique environment that's different from many other folks. So, Morgan, you talked about being a teacher and your passion for what you've been doing now, you went back and got your master's degree. But what led you into the world of accessibility? How did you get started? What first lit that passion?

Morgan Busch  03:05

So, accessibility, specifically, it started in my previous work at BYU. I had been making a whole lot of different tools, a lot of different pieces of software, and one of them kind of spun off greater than the university. So, there were some private entities that were really interested in using it for their own kind of corporate training. And in this instance, there was a hospital group that wanted to use it for training their nurses to follow certain protocols, and for training new hires and things like that. And we were really excited to share it with them, and then they asked for a VPAT. And I'd never even heard of a VPAT before, so it's the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template. So, it's the form they have to fill out to show that their software meets all of these accessibility requirements and specifically for this one, WCAG. At the time, I could hardly even spell WCAG, and I was really proud of this piece of software. We'd spent a long time on it. We were thrilled with how well it had been received with faculty and students, and I thought I knew about accessibility, because I could, like, check for color contrast and things like that, and then I had to fill out that VPat, and I just realized how far we had to go, and just how, how many things I had put in there, like I was the lead I was the designer and the lead developer for this project, and So all of the barriers that were in the software were things that I had put in there, right? And so there's a lot of personal responsibility for like, oh my gosh, I didn't even know and, and, for instance, a lot of it was just with keyboard accessibility, like we had main items in the menu that you just couldn't get to without a mouse, and I hadn't even thought to check for it, and things like that. You know, landmark region, semantic, HTML, there's a million other little things that really should have been in there and just weren't. It wasn't obviously malicious on anybody's part. It wasn't something we were trying to do. And it was just a real kind of cold shower, you know, where it's just like, maybe Ice Bucket Challenge, right? They're just jumping. This like, Oh, man. I thought this was so great. I thought we were doing something in a way that anybody could use. And it turns out, there were so many barriers, and it was something that really kind of woke me up to the way that we typically do things is just kind of thoughtless. We just assume every other user is just like us. They've got a monitor just as wide as ours. They're using a mouse and keyboard just like us. They're able to do the same interactions that we do, and not being able to use the software at all when even a slight change to those things happened was kind of embarrassing, anyway, but so once I when I got to UCF, shortly after I got here, they're very accessibility focused, which is wonderful in our division, there were some funds allocated for training specifically for accessibility. And I jumped on that opportunity. It was with, I think, Deque, for the training, actual like materials and online resources, but for the CPACC certification, and so I was, I was part of the first group that went through that here at UCF, at least in our division. And again, very eye opening, but in a good way, as learning the kinds of things that will help me help other people and inside our teams when we're developing stuff, so it's coming at it from a different, more proactive place, as opposed to just being slapped in the face with it has been very nice.

Sam Evans  06:28

From your when the hospital asked for the VPAT, where did you go to start learning about accessibility at that point in time, when you had this moment of, wow, I had no idea what was your path to start learning at that point in time?

Morgan Busch  06:42

Oh, gosh. So, it was just having to look up the WCAG standards, from W3C and just going to the official documentation. And as a programmer, I look at official documentation and tech specs all the time. It gets pretty onerous, like there's a lot of not really written for humans, sort of technical documentation there where it's it needs to be very specific in the way they write about things, and specific ways to succeed and specific ways to fail on each guideline, but then trying to make those determinations without having kind of that fundamental baseline understanding was really hard, and I didn't have any online courses or other things that that helped in that case. So, it took a long time to fill out that VPAT. And it definitely, I definitely came at it from the wrong place, right? That's not the intent.

Sam Evans  07:40

I was on a call in Microsoft with some other colleagues, and one of the phrases that one of our colleagues from W3C said, that's in charge of way ARIA said, WCAG is not the way in it's not your first step. And

Morgan Busch  07:52

It was, for me it was miserable.

Sam Evans  07:53

And that's what we don't want to have happen. But I think this context of understanding the basics of accessibility and how it impacts people is a softer landing, in a way, in to start to then be able to understand what the intentions are on the normative data that are part of the standards. And so it's been really interesting over the last few years to watch people try to we need to help technologists have the understanding of people first, so that they better understand why there's an ask, and then what the impact is, is it's very technical in nature, and so, but to that point, your program and your work at UCF with you do it is designed to help bridge that gap. And so, we'll talk more about that. We're talking about your UCF time that you had your prep course from Deque that was a preparation for the CPACC here at IAAP, and you earned that. Can you talk a little bit about what the benefits were for you for that study preparation, given that your background from what happened in Utah, and you're coming into UCF, what would you say your value was in the preparation for CPACC, beyond earning the certification you do hold that?

Morgan Busch  08:56

One of the places that people struggle, one of the big stumbling blocks that people often have with accessibility is, you know, how does the how does this apply to me? How specifically was I supposed to do this in the first place? Who does this even affect anyway? And all those kinds of questions which I wouldn't have had the answers to. And that's a major part of the UDOIT software is we're trying not to, just like, give faculty another hoop to jump through. We're trying to help educate them as they go and tell them exactly who this affects and why this affects them, and how to do things in a way that actually doesn't introduce new barriers for them. And so, there's a lot of educational pieces inside of UDOIT didn't have before, and I don't think it would have had without that additional training. Personally, that's been where I've spent a whole lot of my time instead of writing the code myself. You know, we've got a very, very talented team, and I wish I could name all of them, including student developers who have done so much fantastic work, and I've spent a lot of time working on the write ups, so every single issue we have has a full write up of everyone it affects, and how it affects them, and then how to do things properly so you can make the content more accessible, that kind of thing. So it's really, I think, affected the way that I've approached redesigning the app, and it's definitely affected the way that the end users will experience it is much more human focused, and people focus than just kind of a technical thing to do and make your you know, HTML slightly different.

Sam Evans  10:27

IAAP has a lot of members that are in Higher Ed, and then we have a lot of colleagues we work with across other programs and services. And for the most part, I think everybody agrees there's a different approach to faculty and to the staff, administrative side of things, versus the faculty side. And everybody agrees that professors are there because they want to impart knowledge and help you know their students learn what they're passionate about and learn how to do things. So, with that student centric focus, I think that, and we'll talk more about this, but helping faculty understand how and why to do it, to better share their knowledge is magic. So, and then in adoption even better. So, I mentioned briefly, but let me just share for everybody who's an audience here. Morgan was recognized at our G3ict M-Enabling conference in 2025 just in October, and one of our Impact Award winners. And so, the Impact Award is recognizing people that do outstanding contributions above and beyond their role that has wide, sweeping impact to touch as many people, to raise levels significantly. And so Morgan was nominated for and given this award for his implementation on the revamp, for the revision of the UDOIT product that took a lot of vision and pretty strong determination and getting buy in, I would imagine, in Higher Ed structure and funding and and that to lead this major upgrade of the UDOIT program, which is the universal design online content inspection tool. And we'll let Morgan tell you more about that, but it really does speak to the evolving needs of faculty and help guide them from there's some big transitions. We're going to talk about some technical terms. Techies will know this, but they had a PHP based scanner in place, moved to IBM, Equal Access and so more robust, more intuitive, more effective. But it really did help faculty members proactively address accessibility issues, identify those and give them the chance to make those changes in their online digital content, but also give them really good insights on how to foster a more inclusive environment for what they do as professors, teachers and those knowledge experts, right? So, Morgan, first again, congratulations on the Impact Award. It's really impressive, and I'm excited to learn more. So, this is a chance where we're going to give you a chance to explain to anybody who isn't familiar with UCF, or UDOIT, tell us a little bit about it, what inspired your upgrade and your changes. So, this is where we're going to speak to a lot of the technologists who listen in or reading with us. We'll be excited to learn more about this. So go ahead.

Morgan Busch  12:57

Thank you again for the honor and the award too. I was stealth nominated by my supervisor. So, it was very, very pleasant surprise. UDOIT is a course scanning tool. So, UCF, like a lot of other higher educational institutions, use Canvas and then structure product for their learning management system. And so, what you do, it does, is it takes the content that's in your course. So like all of the pages, all of the assignments, all the quizzes, anytime you've typed in something in Canvas and made it part of your course, it takes all that information and then sends it through a scanning tool to find anything it can that would create an accessibility barrier with your course content, and then it provides, hopefully, really, really intuitive, easy to use, ways to fix those things. So one very easy example with accessibility is if you have an image anywhere in your text, that image needs to have some alternative text that someone with a screen reader, or who you know the image doesn't load from data issues or whatever, they have some text that goes there to help explain what the image would show them. And that's not something that you normally see in your browser, like whatever that that's something that's hidden from you 99% of the time, unless you have a screen reader on and is trying to read that. And so having a tool that can kind of catch all those and notice when your image does and doesn't have Alt text. And then, instead of having to type in the proper, you know, HTML code to make that Alt text appear the way you expect it to, we just have a little text field you can fill out and hit save, and then we do the HTML under the hood. So, it just takes that little, all the technical stuff, and kind of hides that away so you can just focus on what the content should be. It also has some reporting tools to help with showing progress over time for your own, you know, well-being as well as in case of, you know, complaints or things that that you would need to show, hey, I am trying this course used to have, you know, 100 different barriers. Now it's down to 20. You can show that I've made progress over time, that sort of thing. And you mentioned the upgrade to the IBM Equal Access scanner. So, there are a number of different open source, free to use scanning tools out there, and we just tried a bunch of them and then threw a bunch of content at them to see what kind of results they got. I kind of hand audited all the results to see which, you know, which ones would actually be pertinent or relevant. And then the one that came out on top for us was, the IBM Equal Access one, which required a whole bunch of re architecting under the hood, but it's a much superior scanner. I will say that, hopefully your listeners will know that there's, there's no such thing as a perfect scanner, like there's nothing that will ever catch everything that could ever be and so even with the the improved scanning tool that finds a lot of different errors that the other previous you know, scanning part of the software never even looked for. There's still definitely a need to listen to individuals. And so, if students would say, hey, I need additional help for this. Or could we also add this feature, or make this thing, you know, add some text instead of this image? Could we do that too. Accommodation really is about meeting people where they're at and so you know, this will hopefully help get rid of all those easy to find issues that get you at a much better baseline. But it's definitely not designed to let you put your guard down and not have to listen to students anymore. So that's hopefully something that we get across well.

Sam Evans  16:40

I think it is interesting. Your approach of how faculty received this, and I think the progress probably will help feel a little bit like rewards. Oh, look, my number has gone down, yay. Hopefully that is seen as I'm making progress. But talking about progress and the ways, I think, having worked at institutional higher education for a number of years, faculty approaches the thing we're like, is this just another thing I have to do, and as a checklist kind of a thing? So, can you speak just a little bit to as opposed to being a checklist perception from faculty members? How did you present this, introduce it, or socialize it as a way to help faculty understand this is going to be an enhancement to you as a professor and a teacher, to best reach your students. How was that socialization approach? How was that received? How did that work? What's your magic suggestion on that? 

Morgan Busch  17:33

Oh, gosh, well, I take no credit for this one. So, we've tried to help encourage people to use UDOIT. Every two weeks, we have a workshop that we've been putting on all semester, and we'll be doing similar things next semester. The first part of that workshop, the first 10 or 15 minutes there's another person who, by the way, was part of my study group when we were preparing for the CPACC certification. Her name is Karen. She's wonderful. So, when we're presenting UDOIT to faculty. She takes the first 10 minutes or so of the presentation just to talk about universal design principles. And she talks about how we just want to make things pleasant for other people to be around. She talks about, you know, when she had to host at a very short notice a nephew who she hadn't really known. He's international from Korea, and that was going to come to UCF, and, oh, we got to find a room in the house for him and figure out where to shuffle everybody else around to and the kinds of steps that they did, just to try to make it a welcoming experience. And a lot of faculty, you know, they don't necessarily have more room for more checklists, and they don't have time to answer all their emails, but they do care about their students, trying to help them understand that look, we're just trying to give you another tool. We're trying to give you another way to help you make your course as welcoming and helpful and as barrier free for your students as possible has had a really good response to that, and then we introduce UDOIT. Here's what the tool looks like, here's how it can help students. Here's specific things that will help you find and remediate and different barriers it helps you remove. And I think that approach has helped, kind of, again, just put the human element in all of it's just about reaching people and helping people as an aside, long aside, sorry, there is a National Disability Center for Student Success, and in their 2025 report, where they did a massive survey of all sorts of higher educational specific students, right? Mean age of 22 right. So, we're talking about young students just starting their college career. And in their study, they went deeply into AC commendations and people who need AC commendations for some sort of disability. And what they found was that 36% of students who have a known disability like they know they've got one, it’s not something that they just learn, although that's another story that something like 50% of people realize they have a disability once they're in university that they didn't catch when they were in high school. Of the 64% that are left that do tell somebody, a lot of them will tell, you know, a close friend or roommate, maybe someone they're, you know, really close with for one way or another. But don't necessarily tell their instructors something like, it's only like 41% of the students with disabilities actually ever tell a teacher or a TA, and of those, I think it's just over 50 something percent have a letter from the Office of Accommodations of some kind, right? So, they've gone through a whole process. So, when you always just crunch the numbers, they get lower and lower and lower. It's something like 20, 25% of students who have disabilities go through the Acommendations process, get an official letter and then go talk to their teachers about it. Like there's so many people who have needs that you as a teacher may never, ever know. They won't talk to you about it. They haven't talked to anybody. Maybe they're embarrassed. There's still such a stigma, especially when it comes to invisible disabilities, right? So, you know, maybe if they're completely legally blind or stuck in a wheelchair, they can't exactly hide it, but a lot of people who have disabilities of one kind or another, especially cognitive ones, there's such a stigma, and maybe they're afraid of, you know, being doubted, or you know, I can handle it without, you know, I don't need the help.

Speaker  21:30

The International Association of Accessibility Professionals currently offers four certifications. IAAP certifications are indicators of your commitment to the accessibility profession, the industry and community. View the certification overview page on our website to learn more.

Sam Evans  21:50

I'm Deaf and Hard of hearing, so I learned to lip read as a child as a way to mask and not get in trouble at school. My math disability I didn't discover until I was in grad school. I had no idea. I just always presumed I was "allergic to math", you know, quote, unquote, and it wasn't until the professor talked with me about it. So, there was finally a name, and there were resources, and at that point, I was old enough to be like, I will welcome this help. But I don't know that I would have done it in undergrad when I was out, striking out to be my own person. So, I think those numbers are important. And what you do it does is it allows all those students who don't disclose and don't ask to get the benefit of more accessible education.

Morgan Busch  22:28

Exactly right, exactly. And that's one of the reasons why it matters so much, is if you only think you're going to fix something that's inaccessible, when someone brings it to your attention, there's so many people that are going to be struggling with something that you could have fixed if you'd only known it was a problem or known how to do it. And they can be, you know, positively impacted and helped as you can solve problems proactively. It's one of my personal pet peeves. Again, I said I was a teacher. I didn't say I was a music teacher, but it's always one of my pet peeves when people try to claim, you know, the reason music educational education is important is because it makes you better at math or something stupid like that. No, music is important in its own right and for its own purposes and if you only think accessibility is helpful because it's also good for other people too. You know, like, if putting your text with good enough contrast is helpful, I guess, well, it's helpful for some people, but I mean, if you're outside on your phone, it's also helpful for you. Okay, now I'll deal with it. It irks me when people say the only reason accessibility is useful is because it's helpful for everyone, to which it is

Sam Evans  23:41

But we serve the needs of people with disabilities, whether they've disclosed, been diagnosed or not.

Morgan Busch  23:46

Yeah, and that should be enough of a reason, like, if we're just helping those people who really legitimately need some help, let's help them anyway. That's worth the effort.

Sam Evans  23:55

So were there cultural challenges, aside from introducing the concept of how and why, and organizationally, how did that get enough teeth and support to move forward?

Morgan Busch  24:07

It's been kind of a two-edged sword. I think, I think by far the biggest problem is just UCF is huge. There's something like 70,000 students. It's one of the biggest public education institutions in the United States, there's, I don't know, between 1500 2000 faculties. It's, it's, it's stupid big. And getting any sort of serious change affected at that level is really difficult. I've attended some accessibility focused conferences for higher education stuff. And UCF is, like, ahead of the curve in a lot of ways, and we do at least have more than one person on the whole campus who's talking about accessibility, speaking to people who are the only person on their campus and trying to, like, ring the bell and no one Listen, sort of thing. So, we do, we do have some structures in place. We've put a lot of effort into accessibility in the past and continue to but on the flip side, even with the updated ADA requirements, which, which, I'm sure, but for your listeners

Sam Evans  25:11

Title II

Morgan Busch  25:11

Yeah, the title two ADA requirement, which goes into effect next April, says that all online content, including stuff behind passwords, so like online course content that only students get to see. It's not like you're just your public facing websites need to be fully accessible by April, and so I'm here like my hair is on fire, like, oh, we got to go faster, like that. We need to fix all these courses by then and there's just not that sense of urgency. But there at least is plenty of support at the university level, at least for our UDOIT team definitely put their money where their mouth is, and it allowed us to use a lot of the resources that we have to put a whole lot of people on this project over the last year or so, as opposed to the other 50 other software projects that we're in charge of for different things. So, we've definitely had a lot of support there, and that's been very helpful. And again, our department was the one that came to us and said, hey, who wants to be trained in accessibility? We're willing to fork over the money for this kind of course, for CPACC training. So that has been very nice. But again, the biggest, the biggest difficulties, just it's a very large ship, and they don't turn very fast. Most faculty don't really have accessibility on the radar yet, for as much as we put it in every, you know, faculty newsletter, and as much as we put it in all these emails that they probably don't read, you know, and we have our own accessibility website that they only go to if they need to, like, it's just not a high enough priority. I think for most people, it doesn't matter how good the tool is if they never use it, you know. So that's been the biggest thing we're trying to accomplish. These workshops that we keep putting on. The room is not full. There's not a whole lot of people that show up proactively. And so, we're trying to find more ways to meet them where they're at. Try to hijack their, you know, department meetings and their college meetings and say, hey, can we have 10 minutes? We really need to introduce you to this thing. Because, boy, there's a clock ticking.

Sam Evans  27:08

But for the folks who've come in, who utilize the tool so your faculty and then their students, is there quality feedback or data about course quality, or teachers feeling more confident, or student experience. Is there a venue for feedback that comes back to y'all about the impact of the touch from UDOIT?

Morgan Busch  27:28

So, the only feedback I've personally gotten, we do have a feedback form in the tool. Hey, if you have some problems or any questions, please, you know, click this thing and it sends a form. But like hardly ever, anybody does that. So, the feedback I've gotten has just been at these workshops that I've helped to attend and to, like, help people. We have this hands-on session at the end where we go into their courses and actually, like, scan their course and fix, you know, the first half dozen things with them, kind of hand holding. And my favorite feedback is, is, there's been multiple people like, oh, oh, that was easy. Okay, I get it. Like, the actual things that need to change are usually very simple, and the same thing something you do it does not do is file accessibility. We don't scan your PowerPoint presentations to make sure that the colors have enough contrast or your Word documents, but there's so many things that you can very easily do, if you just know to do them. So, like with your Word documents, if you're making your headings with larger fonts and just making them bold instead of just clicking the heading button, that can create a barrier when you export it to a PDF, because the PDF doesn't know the difference between big text. But if you make it a heading, first, it can tell, tell everything, and then when you export it, it's accessible, like, just like these tiny little things you can do all along the way that when you just hit, like, go, it's fine, but if you don't know to do them, then you're just unconsciously creating all these tiny barriers for people who try to use your stuff.

Sam Evans  28:54

The aha moments are massive when they understand it's like a map and it's a structure. And, you know, let me show you use your automated table of content creation, and you will see, oh, it saves you some time. But if you don't use the headings, it won't be in the right order. The AHA moment on that alone usually is, is really powerful. And then we can help people translate well, that also applies on the web. And so, you don't need to learn the back end of things, but if you just understand what that structural, semantic, what that does, it's like light bulbs go off and it makes sense. And so, I think that kind of magic happens, probably with Alt text. What does it mean? Oh, it wasn't that complicated. Oh, I can do this. I have the power that's really, I think those are the moments that really will have some really big impact, so.

Morgan Busch  29:47

And most of the software that people use on a regular basis these days does have built in accessibility tools like you try to copy and paste an image into Word, and it'll prompt you, hey, what's the text for this? You know, by the way, I'll auto generate something for you, if you don't put anything, but it's going to be garbage. So, like, can you please just type something here, as opposed to, like, screenshot from a computer or something like that, in the Alt text? But it does try to help make it as easy as possible, so you don't have to know what's going on under the hood. Just if you know that you need to fill it in, you'll fill it in.

Sam Evans  30:19

Do you know what the adoption rate is, is it? Is it in use? By like, do you have an account on how many faculty members log in and use the tool?

Morgan Busch  30:29

This is really going to sound horrible. I don't have usage statistics, although I am always curious. Just anecdotally, I know it's still low. It's definitely less than half of the professors have even, like, opened up the tool to scan it, much less solving stuff in their course. And again, that's the hill we're trying to climb is, like, we've made the thing and we, we launched it, so you'd have a whole year to fix stuff before next April. Will you do it? I don't know. So, we're just hoping that, and that's not my expertise. The kind of marketing and public relations and just getting the word out has been really it's just, it's just difficult, and that's something that, again, not trying to throw anybody under the bus, but that's something that our university administration has kind of told us, they will not do. They're not going to say you absolutely must, by such and such a date, do this and this and this, probably because they'd have, like, a faculty revolt, like, I don't know, like another government, you know, you know, mandate that it's going to take hours. I don't know. So, so if we can't beat them with a stick, you know, what kind of carrot can we dangle? And anyway, it's just trying to get it in front of people and getting it to be higher on their list of priorities is our goal.

Sam Evans  31:46

There are other interactions that cause administration to make things happen moving forward, letters from OCR asking for what's your policy and your plan, usually OCR not being optical character recognition, but Office of Civil Rights for Universities will gain garner attention, so hopefully, will work for people being proactive, using great tools like you do it and engaging, and they have resources available. So, talking about in the dynamic of higher education, what advice would you have to be for others who want to help make higher education more accessible?

Morgan Busch  32:19

Gosh, this is a really, really good question, and I don't have a good answer because of what we're just talking about. The same sort of things we've that we've been struggling with is, you know, you can build whatever tools you want, and you can, I don't think I've mentioned yet. Holy cow, you do it as open source, and it's free. It currently only works with Canvas so far. We have hopes to, at some point, also have it be available for other learning management systems like Blackboard and D2Ll and Moodle and the rest. But right now, it's still just Canvas, but it is a free tool once you get it deployed, but then you have to have it up on the server and there's always going to be some upfront time things to get things up and running. Turn the question on you. I don't know the answer. Like, the biggest struggles we've had have been exactly what you're talking about. There's power structures, there's people, there's faculty with unions, there's every department that has their own rules. There are different ways that people interact with each other. I'm the software developer in a different department that, like, I've got no sway over anybody. I think if I had any advice, it would just be don't get discouraged. And every little bit helps, and every change helps someone. Even if it's if you've only fixed, you know, a few issues in one, of course, it does make a difference. And maybe the mountain looks really large, but it's just one rock at a time, and you'll get through it. 

Sam Evans  33:40

But we can say, wear these kinds of shoes and make sure you take your pack, and. We can help them pack their bag and know what to bring with them as they start to scale. So, I was going to ask you about UDOIT in the fact that open source. So, I think it's really exciting to think that that's possibly an option that could be utilized across all the different systems outside of Canvas. I think Blackboard and Canvas are probably the two big ones and then people adapt Moodle, because it's adaptable. And, you know, people can customize that a great deal. So, is that something like the next three or four years or five years, you think that might be as an option? Is UCF willing to license it out as a UCF offer to higher ed? Is that what it's moving towards is that I know that's a whole different ball of wax for intellectual property and license rights.

Morgan Busch  34:27

What we've found with most of the people that we've dealt with using UDOIT, the hardest thing is just installing the thing, because it needs to run on a server somewhere. So, then you need, like Amazon Web Services, and you need to know, have somebody who knows how to do that. My dream is to have UDOIT be like something that a really small community college with two 70 year old ladies in the office can, like, get up and running and have work for their institution, even if it's doesn't have, I mean, UDOIT or UCF rather, just by virtue of fact, we're so large, we do have a wealth of talent and resources technology. We have a huge IT department, just my team, which is the learning software and technology team. It's got like, you know, 12 or 13 full-timers and 14 or 15 student employees just to build bespoke custom apps like UDOIT that get used at UCF, and that's something that you don't have at most institutions, so.

Sam Evans  35:25

I don't even see that it's some private institution. So that's tremendous.

Morgan Busch  35:30

Yeah, so we have the people to do that kind of thing so, but having a tool that other people can install and use easily is, is my next big goal. We've got something that is currently in use, in production, at UDOIT, or at you do it. Gosh, too many us at UCF, but my next dream is conquering the world and finding ways to make you do it much more easily, installable and usable for other institutions. I'm trying to get greenlit a way to do a desktop version of the app that people could just install the desktop version, log into Canvas and go and not have to have any server whatsoever, or any other expertise that an individual teacher could just go and grab. We're also trying to make easier installers and easier updaters so that they don't have to go through this long server and code heavy process of getting it deployed, so that's our next, some of our next bigger goals, hopefully in the next year or two, those can get approved and move forward on. More realistically and more quickly in the next couple months or the next, by the end of the semester in April, we're hoping to also have better reporting than we currently do, a lot more specific forms. The IBM scanner catches a lot of things, and currently, almost all of them can be fixed right inside of UDOIT, but there's a few things that you have to leave you do it, go into Canvas and fix the error manually, and then come back and continue your work. We're trying to do more and more of those without ever having to leave the platform. So, you can just hit save and then it'll fix it in your course. For you, you just move along and keep going throughout your day.

Sam Evans  37:10

Yeah, that's really impressive, though. So, I'm all of the whole structure on its own, and the fact that the tool can catch and then your team supports things on the back-end sort of things is it's really impressive. So, kudos. I think the models that I just did a workshop with people from some ID league folks, and would teach access about how we get that out, is faculty adoption, because they learn about a student and want to learn more so they can do better, is where the change happens, being asked to update things, to meet requirements is a different way, but probably not as powerful. But that distributed model of accessibility knowledge and accessibility champions really seems to be the way it grows with some with some stability and strength. And so higher ed is it's really, we've been so pleased to see so many schools and ingenious people coming up with these concepts and putting them into products and services that actually get delivered, is really impressive. So y'all are doing great work at UCF, and I reached out to a friend of mine that I used to work with years ago, my first association job, who's at UCF, was a HCI MIS human computer interaction and management of information systems joint professor. And he said, Yeah, he said this accessibility thing, we touched on it a little bit two decades ago, but it's really grown. And he says really a lot of his computer science brain is like, this is really interesting stuff. So, it's got some teeth to it under research and interest too. So, but that's why we all have work to do for a lot of years to come. So, but Morgan, it's been super exciting to learn more about you do it and everything you all are working on at UCF and keep us posted. IAAP has higher ed webinar series and things we should make sure we get this highlighted as an option and help people find out the other ways that they might integrate ideas like this into their work. But for everyone who's taken time to listen or read along with this and transcripts or captions, thank you for joining us today for United and Accessibility. And again, we're really proud to have time with Morgan Busch, one of our 2025 Impact Award winners. I hope we've enjoyed the time to learn a little bit Morgan, by all means, you'll have information to follow them and read more about you do it along with the podcast we've recorded today. So, thank you again, and Morgan, thank you so much. It was such a treat to get to talk with you and learn more. And if I could capture your enthusiasm for accessibility, for all the right reasons, and share it with the world. We would be, we would all be so very, very lucky.

Morgan Busch  39:44

Thank you very much. I really enjoyed our time together, and I appreciate meeting with you.

Sam Evans  39:49

All right. Thanks so much. And everybody else, we will talk with you again soon.

Speaker  39:54

The International Association of Accessibility Professionals offers a variety of membership options for individuals and organizations. Whether you are an expert in accessibility or just starting your journey, join the only global accessibility professional association promoting and improving digital accessibility and physical environments. IAAP advocates for the inclusive design and creation of accessible products, content, services and spaces to ensure no one is left behind due to a physical, sensory, cognitive, health or psychological related impairment, United in Accessibility, join IAAP and become a part of the global accessibility movement.