Supporting Open Textbook Creation
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Stefanie Buck
As a project or program manager, you must consider the accessibility and usability of the works that are being created. In addition, you may want to perform some usability testing to make sure your OER meets institutional and national guidelines or standards.
Universal Design for Learning (UDL)
You should take UDL principles into account when designing OER. UDL differs from accessibility (see below) in that there are no standards and no legal requirements, such as with accessibility, but rather that it is “performance-based.” A well-designed resource using UDL principles will address many of the accessibility issues that commonly arise in the design of OER and can create barriers to learning. The idea behind UDL is to design something that works for everyone. UDL should not be an afterthought but a basic set of principles on which to build your OER content.
UDL means there are:
- Multiple means of representation—to give learners various ways of acquiring information and knowledge
- Multiple means of action and expression—to provide learners alternatives for demonstrating what they know
- Multiple means of engagement—to increase motivation by giving learners choices on how they want to engage in their learning (CAST 2018)
UDL means thinking of all the users and potential users of the OER. Then ask yourself, does this OER meet UDL principles? Who might be excluded from your OER? The benefit of UDL principles is that they improve the usability and accessibility of your OER even for learners who do not fall into the category of “disabled.” For example, having closed-captioning or a transcript of the video benefits not only people with hearing issues but also students whose native language is not English or students with certain learning disabilities. Under the principles of UDL, you design with all your users in mind from the very beginning and thus you greatly improve both the accessibility and usability of your end product without a significant increase in cost. It also helps to reduce the need for design modifications if you have a situation where you need to make an OER accessible (e.g. for a particular student). Retroactively turning an OER into something that meets accessibility guidelines is expensive and time-consuming. Applying UDL principles will make your OER available to as many people as possible, regardless of their circumstances.
Accessibility
Accessibility is one of the primary—but not the only—benefits of using UDL principles from the beginning. An OER that is created correctly from the beginning will significantly reduce the barriers to anyone using the OER. There is, moreover, also both a legal and moral impetus for creating accessible resources. Both accessibility and usability need to be built into your development process and should not be an afterthought, as is often the case (Navarrete and Luján-Mora 2018).
According to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C):
Web accessibility me