This month’s blog post was contributed by Debra Lowman, Associate Dean of Libraries and Learning Resources-District Lead, Scott Community College.

As someone who supports and promotes Open Educational Resources at my college, I’ve always thought about access in terms of affordability and flexibility. As the mother of a deaf/blind child, I’ve always kept the pulse of access. But lately, I’ve been thinking about access a little differently. A brighter light is being placed on accessibility and the college experience, and it’s reshaping how I approach this work. With recent federal updates to Section 504 and ADA Title II, accessibility is no longer something we can treat as a desirable goal. Instead, it’s part of the core expectation for everything we offer across our institutions including students online and what lives in our learning management systems (LMS).

And what lives in most course shells? Often, it includes:

• Old PDFs that were never tagged
• PowerPoints with no reading order
• Videos without captions
• Publisher content embedded via LTI
• OER that are good, but not fully remediated

The good news is that this work aligns closely with what many of us in Iowa have already been trying to do: make learning more open, flexible, and inclusive. The LMS is where that work becomes visible. It’s where students encounter our readings, videos, and assignments. Small design choices can either remove barriers or unintentionally create them. What’s changing now is that we’re being asked—and required—to be more intentional about those choices.

The extension of the compliance deadline to 2027–2028 gives us some breathing room. I don’t see it as a delay so much as an opportunity to approach this thoughtfully rather than reactively. Accessibility isn’t something most of us can fix overnight—not with the amount of content we manage—but it is something we can build into how we work going forward. It also gives those of us who champion OER a chance to meet faculty where they are, especially those who feel overwhelmed and worry that OER is just one more hurdle as they navigate these requirements.

In many ways, this is where OER becomes especially powerful. When I run into an accessibility issue in something openly licensed, I’m not stuck waiting on a vendor or wondering if I’m allowed to fix it—I can just fix it. I can add alt text, clean up document structure, create a different format, or improve how content is presented. Recently, that meant reworking a large body of text in a LibreTexts literature book where key content was prefaced by what was perceived as an image by screen readers instead of readable bullet points. When I share that improved version, it doesn’t just help one student in one class; it becomes part of the resource moving forward.

The broader OER community is leaning into this shift as well. OpenStax is actively working toward WCAG alignment across its materials, and groups connected to the Open Textbook Network are emphasizing accessibility from the start—not as an afterthought. One of the most practical resources I’ve found is the Accessibility Toolkit for OER Authors (Pressbooks, Cleveland State University). It offers clear, hands-on guidance for structuring content, working with images, and designing multimedia, so accessibility becomes part of the creation process rather than something added later.

I’ve also found strong, local support through the Iowa Department for the Blind’s Accessibility 101 for Iowa’s Workforce System, which includes a series of modules with practical examples of accessible content creation. Resources like these remind me that this work isn’t theoretical—it’s actionable. We can start with small steps: improving document structure, writing clearer image descriptions, or checking whether content still makes sense without relying on color alone. Those changes might seem minor, but they add up, and they matter to students in ways we don’t always see. And, as with all OER work, those improvements extend far beyond our own institution.

In Iowa, we already have a strong culture of sharing across institutions. That’s a real strength right now. If we approach accessibility in the same way—fixing, improving, and sharing what we learn—we can have a much greater impact than any one campus working alone.

At the end of the day, this doesn’t feel like a burden to me. It feels like a chance to get closer to what OER has always promised: not just free and flexible materials, but resources that are genuinely usable by more people, right from the start. And that feels like work worth doing well.