Accessibility and Usability
This chapter is an adaptation of the chapter, “Accessibility and Usability” from the OER Starter Kit by Abbey Elder is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 International license.
To ensure educational access for all learners, consider building in accessible design from the beginning of your OER project. UVA’s commitment to equal access can be read in The University’s Statement on Accessibility:
“The University of Virginia values disability within the spectrum of human diversity and is committed to a living, learning, and work environment where individuals with disabilities can be their full selves and thrive. The University recognizes that ensuring equal access to educational, employment, and all other opportunities is a shared responsibility that demands our continuous identification and removal of physical, technological, and attitudinal barriers.”
What do we know about students living with disabilities in our classes? In 2019-2021, 21% of undergraduate and 11% of graduate students nationwide reported having a disability (NCES 2020).[1] Of the types of disability reported, ADHD, learning disabilities, and mental health conditions were most prevalent.
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.”[2]
View this short video (run time: 3 minutes and 30 seconds) from the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, University of British Columbia.
Attribution: “Open Dialogues: Open education and accessibility” by CTLT, University of British Columbia [Youtube] is licensed as CC BY 4.0.
Final Rule of Title II
In April 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a Final Rule under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), mandating that state and local governments ensure their web content and mobile applications are accessible to individuals with disabilities. This rule adopts the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Version 2.1 Level AA as the technical standard for accessibility. Public entities are required to comply with these standards by April 24, 2026.
The WCAG 2.1 Level AA guidelines provide a comprehensive framework to make digital content more accessible, addressing various aspects such as text alternatives for non-text content, adaptable content presentation, and navigable interfaces. By adhering to these guidelines, state and local governments can ensure their digital services are inclusive, enabling individuals with disabilities to access information and participate fully in civic activities and learning endeavors.
When crafting or remixing OER, awareness of the Final Rule is critical. Pay specific attention to digital content including:
- Text and images
- Sounds, audio, video, and animations
- Navigation controls and buttons
- Electronic documents such as PDFs, spreadsheets, charts, presentation files, PowerPoint/Google Slides, etc.
You’re encouraged to bookmark and reference UVA’s Accessibility page for Faculty/Staff.
To navigate these changes, the following may serve as useful references:
Accessibility Toolkit for OER (SUNY)
Video and Audio Recording Captioning/Transcripts (University of Washington)
Be sure to visit the Resources for Further Learning for Session 4 for additional resources.
As you adopt or design open educational resources, consider the following questions. If you answer yes to any of these questions, your content might not be accessible.
- Do I have visual materials that present core concepts that not all students may be able to see or understand?
- Do I have multimedia materials (e.g., audio, video) that present core concepts that not all students may be able to be hear, see, or otherwise access?
- Do I have documents that present core concepts in a format that not all students may be able to access?
Next, let’s examine some basic techniques and areas of focus to make OER content more accessible. More thorough information can be found in the Accessibility Toolkit, originally published by BCCampus.
Software & File 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.
Examples
- Open formats: HTML, ePub, RTF, Mobi, PNG, XML, PDF, Markdown
- Proprietary formats: MS Word, Pages, PowerPoint, Keynote
- 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.
Considerations
- Is the software used to view the OER compatible with most assistive devices?
- Does the software require point-and-click interaction to work properly?
- Can the software menus be “seen” and properly interpreted by screen readers?
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
Image & 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.
Examples
Good example:
- First list item
- Second one
Bad example:
* First list item
* Second item
Provide alt text & 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.
Examples
- Necessary descriptive alt text: “Part a of the figure shows a container which has a gas of volume V subscript 1 on the left side and nothing on the right side. Part b shows a container which is completely filled with a gas of volume V subscript 2.”
- Too much descriptive alt text: “There is a figure with a white background and two squares labeled a and b. Part a has a rectangle (representing a container) with a shaded grey section on the left half of the container with dots representing a gas. The gas is labeled V subscript 1. Part b…”
- Unnecessary descriptive alt text: “An icon of a person smiling – I put this here as a cute picture to liven up the page!”
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, see The Captioning Project at UVA, 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.
Examples
Digital OER should have descriptive links that explain to where the hyperlink is going to navigate the reader.
- Good example: Information on the BC Open Textbook Project is available online.
- Bad example: Click here for information on the BC Open Textbook Project.
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 & Colors
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.”[3]
Additional Resources
- Protocol for Creating Accessible OER (National Center on Accessible Educational Materials at CAST)
- Accessibility Toolkit for Open Educational Resources (CUNY)
- Digital Content and Media Accessibility (UBC)
- Accessibility Toolkit (BCCampus)
- Forward with FLEXibility (McMaster University)
- Table 311.10. Number and percentage distribution of students enrolled in postsecondary institutions, by level, disability status, and selected student characteristics National Center for Education Statistics. May 2020. ↵
- W3 Schools. "Web Accessibility." Accessed May 15, 2022. https://www.w3.org/WAI/bcase/soc.html#of ↵
- 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/ ↵
Accessibility can be viewed as the "ability to access" something. The concept of accessible design and practice of accessible development ensures both "direct access" (i.e. unassisted) and "indirect access" meaning compatibility with a person's assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (Source: Wikipedia.org)
A word or phrase that can be inserted as an attribute in an HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) document to tell website visitors the nature or contents of an image. (Source: WhatIs.com)