OER Accessibility | The Teaching & Learning Centre | Seneca Polytechnic

Under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA, 2005) it is your responsibility, as a user or publisher of educational content, to ensure that your material meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 accessibility criteria.

What material needs to be made accessible?

Educational content which contain things like quizzes, audio, video or images need to adhere to universal design principles and consider users of all abilities and how they access materials.

What kind of accessibility statement needs to accompany an open textbook?

You may consider including an accessibility statement on how to request another format on the landing page to your book.

Who is responsible for making reused open textbooks accessible?

Professors who reuse materials created elsewhere take on the responsibility of making this content accessible to their own students.

What kind of toolkits are there to guide me through this process?

This BC Open Textbook Accessibility Toolkit is an excellent resources and provides tips on accessibility throughout the authoring process outlining best practices of how to incorporate multimedia materials, resource template considerations and test a sample chapter for keyboard accessibility, any instructional content and reading navigation order. It addresses principles of universal design and provides best practices related to:

• Organizing your content
• Tagging images
• Embedding weblinks
• Incorporating multimedia
• Making formulas accessible
• Ensuring font size and contrast ration meet accessibility criteria

At the end of this guide, a simple checklist document is available for a quick accessibility overview of a given open textbook.

UBC has also created a step-by-step guide for accessibility in OERs. You can find their guide here: http://open.ubc.ca/teach/oer-accessibility-toolkit/

This page is a derivative of openetext.onlinelearning.utoronto.ca/accessibility used under CC BY 4.0.