Accessibility is very important but unfortunately not always evenly applied in Open or Affordable resources you may use and encounter. For the OA awards project, we ask that you inform yourself about best practices in accessibility and make a good faith attempt to apply these practices within the constraints of your materials and time.
To learn about best practices and standards in accessibility, start with these resources from the OER Accessibility Toolkit created and openly licensed by the University of British Columbia.
The focus of many open education projects is to provide access to education. But what does access mean? If the materials are not accessible for each and every student, do they fulfill the mandate to deliver fully open education? The open education movement has helped people in different parts of the world access content that they would otherwise not be able to view or interact with. Open education resources reduce costs for students and allow for greater flexibility for instructors. Accessibility can help push the movement even further forward.
The goal of the OER Accessibility Toolkit is to provide the needed resources needed to each content creator, instructor, instructional designer, educational technologist, librarian, administrator, and teaching assistant to create a truly open and accessible educational resource — one that is accessible for all students.
As you work through the content of the OER Accessibility Toolkit, you will find that the suggestions provided are intended for the non-technical user. If you are looking for more technical descriptions of how to make your work accessible, we suggest you review the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines).
At a minimum, we ask you to run accessibility checkers on all your course documents (Word and pdf) and consider accessibility of any websites or other multimedia you may use.
Think of accessibility along a spectrum, you do not need to be an expert to move the needle toward greater accessibility where you can.
In the chat channel for accessibility, please share some of your experiences with making course materials more accessible. It could be an example of a document or resource you have made more accessible. Or some software or resource you know about from working to accommodate a student need. How accessible are the resources you will be implementing for this award? Did you have to make any major modifications?
Campus Connection: Have you met Mary Little? She directs the Disability Services Office at ETSU.
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) comes up in this tutorial. Get more on accessibility for OERs from a UDL lens here.