Module 6: Accessibility & Inclusion

Learning Objectives

By the end of this module you should be able to:

Design OER to be optimally accessible
Understand how to organize content centering accessibility principles
Learn about creating OER for diverse audiences

Designing for Accessibility, Inclusion, and Diversity

As you work on developing OER and integrating it into your teaching, you will need to make sure that what you create is responsive to your students’ needs and reflects their voices and realities. It can be difficult to make sure that your resources and instructional practices are inclusive and accessible, and it is a process that can be revisited over time. It’s never too late or too early to start thinking about making your OER as inclusive and as accessible as possible.

You may be surprised to learn that during the 2020-21 school year, 15% of all public school students received special education services, and a full ⅓ of those students had learning disabilities. These students benefit directly from accessible course materials since these materials work well with assistive technologies, like screen readers.

Yet as the University of Minnesota points out, accessible design can help many people who do not have disabilities. Captions on videos, for instance, can help English language learners better understand a video presentation, and a transcript of a podcast can help students who need to do their coursework in very noisy or very quiet places.

In addition to designing for accessibility, it’s equally important to design your OER for diversity. Diversity in open education can be achieved by including a variety of sociological perspectives in your open content. Critical here is ensuring that other cultures are presented accurately in your materials, and not according to stereotypes or perceptions based on the standards of your own culture.

Also consider how other aspects of identity can be included in your open content – such as including perspectives from people with a variety of ages, from different income levels, who live in different parts of the country and world, who are many sizes and shapes, etc. Doing this ensures that a wide variety of your students can identify with and relate to your course material.

Universal Design

The term “universal design” was coined by architect Ron Mace, a person who used a wheelchair and who discovered many inaccessible features in the built environment. He described universal design as “design that’s usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design.”

But universal design extends beyond architecture and city planning; universal design in educational contexts seeks to create barrier-free educational resources that work with adaptive and assistive technologies. It also seeks to blend aesthetics into these core considerations. The Universal Design framework can be used in many educational contexts, including the creation of OER.

For our purposes, we will frame the practice of using Universal Design in a holistic and manageable way and begin by addressing barriers that are easy to anticipate and proactively remediate. This module will be helpful if you answer yes to any of the following questions:

Do I have visual materials that present core concepts that not all students may be able to see or understand?
Do I have multimedia materials (e.g., audio, video) that present core concepts that not all students may be able to hear, see, or otherwise access?
Do I have documents that present core concepts in a format that not all students may be able to access?

Using Personas

Designers use personas to represent the different types of people who might access a website or use a product. Using personas can help you keep in mind the types of students and their various abilities while you’re developing content. These personas can also be used to introduce the different types of hardware and software that students typically use, as well as assistive technologies that they rely on.

Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery have included a set of personas in their book, A Web for Everyone: Designing Accessible User Experience that are specific to post-secondary students with print disabilities. These are some of the students who will be reading the open textbooks that you write and interacting with the multimedia you create. It’s a good idea to visit this website to get an idea of how to use personas in developing inclusive OER.

Organizing Content

Following basic organizational principles for text, links, images, tables, multimedia, and formulas goes a long way toward making your OER accessible to all learners. You can learn about these principles in Amanda Coolidge, Sue Doner, and Tara Robertson’s BC Open Textbook Accessibility Toolkit. The list below provides an overview:

Text

Using chapters, headings, and sub-headings to organize a resource allows students to clearly see how the main concepts are related. In addition, headings are one of the main ways that students using a screen reader navigate through a chapter. Headings help to identify the hierarchical structure of a document (e.g., sections, sub-sections). They provide a visual cue that helps sighted readers quickly navigate through sections of a document, skimming until they find the section they are looking for. Similarly, headings create logical divisions in the content and allow a non-sighted user to navigate a page or document easily using a screen reader.

When it comes to using visual references to indicate the hierarchy and structure of a document, you might be accustomed to changing the font style, enlarging the type size, or highlighting the text with bold, underline or italics to create the impression of a heading. This approach presents problems when creating material with accessibility in mind because screen readers won’t identify the text as a heading. Instead, the screen reader will just “read” through the text of a heading as if it were regular content, missing your intended cues about structure and organization.

Images

Before you can determine what to do to make an image accessible, you must identify its purpose or value to your OER. Consider the following questions:

Does your image serve a functional purpose? In other words, is it conveying non-text content to students? If so, you should provide a text alternative (“alt text”) that serves the equivalent purpose of the image. For instance, if you include a photograph of a cracked brick wall to demonstrate the need for infrastructure repairs, the alt text may read “A brick wall of a building with visible cracks and lumber to reinforce it.”
Does your image serve more of a decorative purpose? In other words, is it primarily a design element that does not convey content? If so, you should avoid unnecessary text descriptions, leaving a set of quotation marks (“”) in the alt-text field of whatever authorship tool you are using.

You should also avoid relying on subtle color to convey information in graphs or charts. Try using high-contrast colors that will also be readable in black-and-white. You should also attempt to describe your images contextually, in the text of the OER itself or in a caption or long description.

Links

Like other non-text elements, links must be assessed for how students with a range of challenges can and will access them. Understanding and attending to these needs through descriptive text, proper link opening, and—when needed—a web address will ensure that all students can benefit.

You need to ensure that all links have text that describes the topic or purpose of the link. This is important because people using screen readers might have their screen reader set to read out the text for each link on a page. As such, the link text must describe the content of the link when taken out of context for the surrounding paragraph. While link texts such as “click here” or “read more” will make sense to sighted users, they mean nothing when read on their own.

In the examples below, example 3 has the most user-friendly link since it still describes the content of the link, even when taken out of the full sentence it’s part of.

Example 1: Click here for information on Iowa OER.
Example 2: You can find more information on Iowa OER at https://iowaoer.com/.
Example 3: Information on Iowa OER is available online.

Tables

In the same way that your content hierarchy needs headings and structure, tables need a properly defined structure to be accessible. This means that you must add row and column headers to define the different sections of data. Screen readers read tables horizontally—cell by cell, row by row—and row and column headers help give context to the data in each cell for students who are blind, have low vision, or have a cognitive disability.

We recommend you make every effort to keep data tables as simple in structure as possible. The more complex the design of a data table, the less accessible it will be for some students using screen-reading technology to access their OER materials. Screen readers move left-to-right, top-to-bottom, one cell at a time, and because a screen reader does not repeat a cell, merging or splitting cells can affect the reading order of a table.

Multimedia

Many types of multimedia present information in a non-textual manner. For students unable to use the original version of these formats, providing text as a transcript, caption, or written description gives them access.

Before you can determine what you need to do to make media accessible, you must understand what is required for different types of multimedia. Consider the following questions:

Does your multimedia resource include audio narration or instructions? If so, you should provide a complete transcript of all speech content and relevant non-speech content in the resource.
Does your multimedia resource include audio that is synchronized with a video presentation? If so, you should provide audio descriptions of relevant visual materials in the resource.
Does your multimedia resource include contextual visuals (e.g., charts, graphs) that are not addressed in the spoken content? If so, you should provide audio descriptions of relevant visual materials in the resource.

Formulas

There are several ways to make equations more accessible, from displaying equations as images with alt tags to using programming languages such as LaTex or MathML. Having access to an equation editor such as MathType or MathMagic can streamline processing and converting equations. These tools are similar to equation editors found in the Microsoft Office.

LaTex is a math markup language familiar to many in the science and math community. Unfortunately, it is not currently supported by screen reader technology. It is, however, fairly simple to convert LaTeX to an image or MathML in most equation editors.
MathML is a text-based XML (short for “extensible markup language”) designed for math equations. Browsers that support MathML are able to translate the XML into a formatted equation.

Accessibility checklist

This checklist can help provide an at-a-glance look at the accessibility of your OER. However, you may want to consider a deeper dive into accessibility topics that relate directly to your project. Most institutions have accessibility experts that can help with this process.

Click here for an accessible PDF version of this checklist for easy printing and saving.

	Content is organized under headings and subheadings
	Headings and subheadings are used sequentially.
	Images that convey information include alternative text (alt text) descriptions of the image’s content or function.
	Graphs, charts, and maps also include contextual or supporting details in the text surrounding the image.
	Images do not rely on color to convey information.
	Images that are purely decorative do not have alt-tag descriptions. (Descriptive text is unnecessary if the image doesn’t convey contextual content information).
	The link is meaningful in context and does not use generic text such as “click here” or “read more.”
	Links do not open in new windows or tabs.
	If a link must open in a new window or tab, a textual reference is included in the link information (e.g., [NewTab]).
	Tables include row and column headers.
	Row and column headers have the correct scope assigned.
	Tables include a caption.
	Tables avoid merged or split cells.
	Tables have adequate cell padding.
	A transcript is available for each multimedia resource including relevant non-speech content.
	Formulas have been created using MathML.
	Formulas are images with alternative text descriptions if MathML is not an option.
	Font size is 12-point or higher for body text.
	Font size is 9-point for footnotes or endnotes.
	Font size can be zoomed to 200%.

Knowledge Check

Identify a material you currently use in your teaching, like a handout, worksheet, lecture slides, or assignment sheet. Apply the accessibility checklist above to that item to explore how your current course materials do or do not meet accessibility needs.

Learn More and Attributions

Accessibility Toolkit – 2nd Edition by BCcampus is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Anderson, Nikki. (2022) Enhancing Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility (IDEA) in Open Educational Resources (OER). University of Southern Queensland.

Adam, T., Bali, M., Hodgkinson-Williams, C., & Morgan, T. (2019). Can we decolonize OER/Open? OER19. Retrieved from https://oer19.oerconf.org/news/blog-can-we-decolonize-oer-open-decolonizeopen/#gref

Bolger, M. (2020). What’s the difference between diversity, inclusion, and equity? General Assembly. Retrieved from https://generalassemb.ly/blog/diversity-inclusion-equity-differences-in-meaning/

Una Daly, James Glapa-Grossklag and Jamie Thomas (2022). Open for Antiracism: Institutional Impact in Year 2 [Video]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/911n7kItXfk

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