Open Educational Resources must be accessible to all students. Below are resources that help with accessibility standards for OER.
EVALUATE
Accessibility Criteria to Consider
- Navigation that is clear and consistent.
- Properly structured documents, including headings.
- Sufficient color contrast. Avoid using color to convey meaning.
- Alternative text descriptions - for images, tables, equations, maps, etc.
- Intelligibly-captioned multimedia and descriptive audio.
- High quality scans with no highlighting or handwriting.
- PDFs that are text renderable, tagged, and structured appropriately.
- Meaningful hyperlinks. Avoid phrases like ‘click here’ and ‘more’.
CREATE
Remember to:
- Include Alt Text for images
- Pay attention to color and contrast
- Think about layout and design within Microsoft Office
- Provide closed captions and/or audio descriptions within silent multimedia clips
- Avoid unwieldy hyperlinks
- Structure content clearly, include headings
- Make tables understandable with headings within tables
- Avoid depending on color to communicate meaning
- License your work with Creative Commons
(Special thanks to Penn State's Accessibility Office for creating so many great resources)
Accessibility Tools
- WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation ToolUse to evaluate the accessibility of web pages
- tota11yAccessibility visualization toolkit
- Microsoft Accessibility CheckerUse to evaluate your Microsoft Office content
- Adobe Acrobat PDF Accessibility CheckerCheck the accessibility of PDFs
- The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) works with organizations around the world to develop resources, guidelines, and strategies to help make the Web accessible to people with disabilities. The site provides guidelines, techniques, and opportunities to contribute to the global effort to eliminate barriers to web access.
- Section 508Section 508 of the US Federal Rehabilitation Act requires that Federal agencies’ electronic and information technology be accessible to people with disabilities. IT Accessibility & Workforce Division, in the U.S. General Services Administration’s Office of Governmentwide Policy, created this site with the goal of educating Federal employees on Section 508 implementation.