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.

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.”

Software and format choice

The usability of an OER is heavily impacted by how easily users can access it. Two aspects of content design that are inherently tied to accessibility are a resource’s file format and the software used to access it.

Choose open file formats

If someone wants to read your work, they need to be able to open the file on their computer; however, some file formats require specific proprietary software to open. Saving your work in open file formats can give your students more options for accessing their course content on whatever platform best meets their needs.

• Markdown converter tool: The University of Oklahoma Libraries’ Markdown Converter can be used to easily convert your Markdown text into most other formats.

Use accessible software

Some software used to create or display content disables accessibility features built into your computer’s operating system, such as zoom, text-to-speech, and speech-to-text. It is important to check whether the software students will use to view your course content disables the accessibility features of their computer’s operating system. This can be an issue both for OER and for traditional, publisher-provided course content.

How to check software accessibility

• Check common assistive keyboard shortcuts while using the software.
• Ensure that users can navigate content using only the keyboard if necessary.
• Enable OS accessibility features and check their effectiveness with the required software.

How to access common accessibility features

• Windows accessibility features
• Mac OS X accessibility features

Image and text readability

Whenever you are presenting content to students, it’s important to check whether the text in your course content is recognizable to a computer as text. For PDFs, accurate optical character recognition (OCR) is often required to make the text understandable. Screen-readers require this information to accurately relay text back to students. Other best practices for making course materials readable are listed in the sections below.

Use heading levels (h1, h2, h3)

Text-based OER should always have a clear and logical structure. Using headings and other structural elements to organize your resource can make it easier for all learners to access and understand the material. Many editing tools support table of contents (TOC) generation based on where these section markers are placed. This can help students navigate to a specific chapter or section of a text, especially if the digital version of the resource has its TOC hyperlinked to each section within the text.

Individuals using screen readers can also more easily navigate the sections of your content when headings levels have been applied consistently.

Use true lists

While they may “look” similar to bulleted lists, using asterisks or icons to create a visual list of items can confuse a screen reader that is expecting to encounter structured content. Whenever listing items, use the true list features of your content editor, such as bullet points or numbered lists.

Provide alt text and captions

No matter the subject of an image used in your content, you need to offer descriptive text. A screen reader will look for a contextual description of an image to share with readers, which should live in the text surrounding the image (title or caption) or as alternative (“alt”) text. This is one of the most commonly overlooked aspects of accessibility for instructional content, but most text editors include tools for adding alt text to images.

When adding alt text to an image, be sure to clearly and succinctly describe the most important elements for the student to know. Do not include extraneous detail. In some cases, you do not need to add alt text at all, as in the case of purely decorative images.

Video and audio content needs descriptive text as well, but these usually take the form of captions or, in the case of podcast recordings, transcripts. You can easily add captions to videos using Canvas’ Arc tool or by using YouTube’s built-in editor tools. For more help with this process, read through the excellent Captioning Videos guide from the University of Washington or reach out to an instructional designer near you.

Use descriptive link text

Ensure that all web pages and links have titles that describe a topic or purpose. The purpose of the link can be determined by the text alone. That is, you don’t need to include additional information justifying the use of the link. You want the link to be meaningful in context. For example, do not use generic text such as “click here” or “read more” unless the purpose of the link can be determined by meaning in the surrounding content.

If the OER design does not permit the inclusion of explicit links in the text, implicit links can be used, and a more detailed list of sources should be provided at the end of the resource or in a separate document. Footnotes are a great way of providing more explicit links for content without cluttering the text on a page.

Use accessible fonts and colours

OER should be readable for those with disabilities related to color as well. Some best practices for ensuring that fonts and colors are accessible are described below:

• Use dyslexic-friendly fonts, such as Arial, Century Gothic, Open Sans, and Verdana. Your institution might recommend certain fonts for digital and print materials. These recommended fonts are usually chosen for ease of use and accessibility and may be a good fit for your needs as well.
• Make sure there is a clear contrast between colors (e.g. between the background and font color, or between separate colors on a graph). There are many free online tools available for checking color contrast, but we recommend WebAim’s Color Contrast Checker and ContrastChecker.com.
• Do not use color to communicate meaning without other markers of that meaning present. If you have color-dependent information in images or within the text of your resource, be sure that either alternative methods of recognition (such as differing patterns) are present, or that the contrast can be adjusted by users.

Online accessibility tools

A great deal of OER content is displayed on websites, where we can use accessibility-checking tools to identify areas that can make it difficult for assistive technology tools to work properly. The online WAVE tool does just that: identifying errors and possible issues with the accessibility of websites.

The Flexible Learning for Open Education (floe) website provides access to a suite of tools intended to “supports learners, educators and curriculum producers in achieving one-size-fits-one learning design for the full diversity of learners.”

This material is adapted from The OER Starter Kit by Abbey K. Elder is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Additional Attributions:

1. Attribution: The original source chapter is sourced from The ABOER Starter Kit, by Technologies in Education at the Faculty of Education, the University of Alberta, licensed CC BY 4.0.
2. W3 Schools. “Web Accessibility.” Accessed May 15, 2019. https://www.w3.org/WAI/bcase/soc.html#of
3. CAST. “About Universal Design for Learning.” Accessed July 15, 2019. http://www.cast.org/our-work/about-udl.html
4. CAST. “Universal Design for Learning Guidelines Version 2.2,” 2018. Accessed July 1, 2019. http://udlguidelines.cast.org/
5. Coolidge, Amanda, et al. Accessibility Toolkit – 2nd Edition. Victoria, BC: BCcampus, 2015. https://opentextbc.ca/accessibilitytoolkit
6. Edyburn, Dave L. Accessible Instructional Design. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2015.
7. Attribution: “Software & File Format Choice” was adapted from “Accessibility webpage” by Affordable Learning Georgia and UH OER Training by Billy Meinke, licensed CC BY 4.0.
8. For more information, see floe’s Inclusive Learning Design Handbook online at https://handbook.floeproject.org/ or visit their source code on GitHub: https://github.com/fluid-project/