Accessibility and Usability
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
- Provide three examples of ways an OER can be checked for accessibility.
- Explain how Universal Design for Learning is a good practice for both pedagogy and accessibility.
Accessibility is one of the things that will determine the usability of an OER for learners with diverse needs. Exemplary OER borrow many best practices from web design, ensuring that content is readable and works as intended for all users.[1]
W3 Schools defines web accessibility as:
“Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can use the Web. More specifically, Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web, and that they can contribute to the Web. Web accessibility also benefits others, including older people with changing abilities due to aging.”[2]
Attribution: “Open Dialogues: Open education and accessibility” by CTLT, University of British Columbia [Youtube] is licensed CC BY 4.0.
Universal Design for Learning
Apart from more traditional aspects of accessibility, you can also make your course more accessible through the way(s) in which you present that content. One method is Universal Design for Learning (UDL), “a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn.”[3]
UDL claims that you can improve education for all learners by providing multiple ways of engaging with your course’s content. There are various ways to implement UDL in your teaching:
- Represent ideas from different angles and in different media types to accommodate the diverse needs of learners.
- Provide support for students to express their understanding of concepts in different ways.
- Allow students to engage in different ways by providing a variety of assignment types.[4]
As the BC Campus OER Accessibility Toolkit (2015) argues, UDL principles can be applied to accessibility as well as learning. The toolkit provides the following examples for instructors:[5]
- Design resources that can be accessed by learners in a variety of ways. If there is a text component, provide the ability to enlarge the font size or change the text color.
- Provide multiple ways for learners to engage with information and demonstrate their knowledge.
- Identify activities that require specific sensory or physical capability and for which it might be difficult to accommodate the accessibility needs of learners (e.g., color matching activities).
Universal Design for Learning and Universal Design are two separate but interrelated concepts. While UDL is intended to improve both the accessibility and pedagogy of a learning environment, UD is primarily intended as an approach to making content accessible to as many people as possible.[6] We focus on UDL in this chapter because the design of open educational resources is inextricably connected to how they will be implemented as learnin