OER and Accessibility (And Why It Matters!)

Open Education, Accessibility, and Universal Design

Let’s begin this OER Coffee Break by watching this short video (3 1/2 mins) from the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology. This video focuses on how accessibility and universal design connect with the principles of open education.

One inspiring takeaway from this video gets at the WHY of accessibility and OER:

Faculty are required to ensure that the teaching materials they use are accessible to all students. Applying a universal design approach to your curriculum allows you to improve accessibility for all learners.

Ronald Mace and colleagues at North Carolina State University coined the term Universal Design (UD), with the understanding that designing to meet the needs of disabled people benefits everyone. For example, a curb cutout, designed to accommodate wheelchairs transitioning from sidewalks to streets, also benefits people with strollers, bike riders, and people who may have depth issues.

Universal design means that we design courses that are the most useful to the most different types of people. A proactive approach improves accessibility for all students. For example, although closed captions are added for deaf students, many students may use them when watching online videos in the library or if they are learning English. Using a UD framework makes our courses more user-friendly for all learners.

Equity, Universal Design, and Accessibility

Universal design, accessibility, and OER all support equity. We explored this connection in the Equity in Open Education (Challenges AND Opportunities!) OER Coffee Break, including how these elements are featured in the Framework for Reviewing Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Open Educational Resources, which is a practical starting point for assessing and editing OER for inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility (IDEA).

An Overview of Accessibility

As instructors, we have legal and ethical obligations to ensure that our courses are fully accessible to all learners, including those with disabilities. We use digital resources in our courses because we believe they enhance learning. However, unless carefully chosen with accessibility in mind, these resources can have the opposite effect for students with disabilities, erecting daunting barriers that make learning difficult. For example, consider the accessibility challenges students described below might face.

• Students who are deaf or hard of hearing are unable to access the contents of a video presentation unless it’s captioned.
• Students who are blind or visually impaired use assistive technologies such as audible screen reader software or Braille devices to access the content of websites, online documents, and other digital resources. They depend on authors providing alternate text that describes the content of images as well as headings, subheadings, lists, and other markup that helps them understand the structure and outline of the resource.
• Some students who have learning disabilities such as dyslexia use assistive technologies that visibly highlight digital text as it’s read aloud, and are therefore dependent on text being readable (as opposed to a scanned image).
• Students who are physically unable to use a mouse are unable to use interactive web and software applications unless these applications can be operated with a keyboard.
• Students who are color blind may be unable to understand content that communicates information solely using color (for example, a bar chart with color as the sole means of differentiating between the bars).

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, provide an international standard that defines accessibility of web-based resources. The principles of WCAG 2.1 are applicable to other digital assets as well, including software, video, and digital documents. Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act require colleges, universities, and other postsecondary institutions to provide equal opportunities to people with disabilities in all their operations, and Washington State’s Digital Accessibility Policy also establishes that expectation on the state level.

Choosing and Using Accessible Course Material

When choosing among the wide variety of course materials that are available, be sure to consider whether these materials might present challenges or barriers for students with disabilities. Ask specific questions, such as:

• Is all written content presented as text, so students using assistive technologies can read it?
• If the materials include images, is the important information from the images adequately communicated with accompanying alt text?
• If the materials include audio or video content, is it captioned or transcribed?
• If the materials have a clear visual structure including headings, sub-headings, lists, and tables, is this structure properly coded so it’s accessible to blind students using screen readers?
• If the materials include buttons, controls, drag-and-drop, or other interactive features that are operable with a mouse, can they also be operated with a keyboard alone for students who are physically unable to use a mouse?
• Do the materials avoid communicating information using color alone (e.g., the red line means X, the green line means Y)?

If you find open course materials that are perfect for your course but you are unable to answer “Yes” to each of the above questions, then you may need to address the accessibility of the OER materials. In upcoming OER Coffee Breaks, we will explore how to assess these specific areas of accessibility as well as take deeper dives into accessibility issues for OER textbooks and materials in different, common file formats.

References & Attributions

The OER Coffee Break series has original content and adaptations by Jennifer Snoek-Brown, OER Librarian, Tacoma Community College, and is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

• Content & activity adapted from:
  • “Accessibility” from Open Educational Resources: Basics & Beyond by Oklahoma Council for Online Learning Excellence (COLE) Member Volunteers, licensed under CC BY 4.0
  • “Open Washington Learn OER – Module 9: Accessibility” by Open Washington, licensed under CC BY 4.0
  • “Framework for Reviewing Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility in Open Educational Resources” from Enhancing Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility (IDEA) in Open Educational Resources (OER) by University of Southern Queensland, licensed under CC BY NC SA 4.0
• Video source from “Open Dialogues: Open education and accessibility” by Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, University of British Columbia is licensed under CC BY 4.0
• Additional content sources from:
  • “Equity in Open Education (Challenges AND Opportunities!)” from OER Coffee Breaks by Jennifer Snoek-Brown, TCC Library, licensed under CC BY SA 4.0