4 Accessibility and UDL
The focus of many OER projects is to provide access to education at low or no cost. If the materials are not accessible for each and every student, they do not fulfill the mandate to deliver fully open educational resources.
This section outlines a number of resources that will help ensure your resource will be accessible for all students, including students with disabilities.
New to Accessibility? Start Here
There are two resources available that provide an introduction to accessibility in open educational resources and specifically cover how to make resources published in Pressbooks accessible to disabled students. They cover similar information, so you can choose depending on whether you would like to read or watch a video.
- Read the Accessibility Toolkit or
- Watch this webinar:
Here are some additional accessibility resources that may be helpful:
- STEM OER Accessibility Framework and Guide: A plain language, check-list overview of web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) with a specific focus on STEM content.
- Accessible STEM Resources: A list of resources related to accessibility in STEM content.
Accessibility Requirements
You should be familiar with the accessibility requirements before you start working on your resource and check back as needed. These are the minimum accessibility requirements that we aim to achieve for all open resources that we publish.
These requirements apply regardless of what platform you are working in. If you are working in Pressbooks, see the Accessibility section in the BCcampus Open Education Publishing Style Guide for technical instructions about how to achieve all of these things in Pressbooks.
The OER Production Team is here to help, and we will make sure that your resource meets all of these criteria before publishing. Are you creating something that isn’t covered in the accessibility criteria? Reach out to the OER Production team for input.
BCcampus Image Description Policy
Images are powerful tools that can convey a lot of information in very little space. However, not everyone will be able to access those images, so writing image descriptions is a vital part of making your resource accessible to all students.
Because image descriptions are context dependent and can contain a lot of information, they are often best written by someone with subject matter expertise who understands what is going on in the image and what students should be getting out of it. As such, authors are responsible for writing image descriptions as they add images to the resource.
The OER Production team is available to provide specific guidelines and feedback on your descriptions, but we need your expertise to ensure the descriptions are accurate and useful for students. If you have a lot of complex images, set up a meeting with us so we can talk through strategies for describing images.
Document Accessibility: PowerPoint, Microsoft Word, PDF
If you are creating content in a platform other than Pressboo