1. Accessibility and oer design
Round Eleven Kickoff Meeting
February 26, 2017

2. US Accessibility Laws: ADA Title III

3. US Accessibility Laws: ADA Title III with Educational Resources

4. US Accessibility Laws Affect OER

5. US Accessibility Laws: Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Section 508
“In 1998, Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 to require Federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology (EIT) accessible to people with disabilities. The law (29 U.S.C. § 794 (d)) applies to all Federal agencies when they develop, procure, maintain, or use electronic and information technology. Under Section 508, agencies must give disabled employees and members of the public access to information that is comparable to the access available to others.”

6. Promote Educational Equity and Prevent Discrimination through Accessible OER
“Releasing textbooks and other educational resources with open-copyright [licenses] is a big step toward removing barriers, as it makes these materials free of cost and free to use, distribute, and change. But there is more that goes into accessing a resource than it just being free and online.
For a textbook to be truly accessible, people of all abilities need to be able to access the content. This means designing a textbook that accommodates people with diverse learning styles and ensuring the content can be accessed by all, regardless of disability.”
–BCcampus Self-Publishing Guide, 2018

7. https://opentextbc.ca/accessibilitytoolkit
Practices and photos are adapted from the BCcampus Accessibility Toolkit, CC-BY 4.0:
Additional information provided by
Katie Bridges, Instructional Designer,
Georgia Highlands College

8. Best Practice 1: Organize Your Content
Supports students who:
Have a learning disability
Are blind or have low vision
Do create effective, accessible headings and titles by using the Styles option in document creators such as Word and LibreOffice. Properly tag headers in HTML.
Do not create titles and headers through only editing the appearance of text on the page, such as making headers bold or titles larger.

9. Best Practice 2: Make Your Images Accessible
Supports students who:
Are blind, have low vision
Are colorblind or have low-contrast vision
Have a cognitive disability
Use monochrome displays

10. Best Practice 2 (continued): Make Your Images Accessible
Do provide alternative text that describes the content and function of an image. Do include an alt-text box for decorative images, but leave them blank. Do use high-contrast shades to convey information in a chart or graph. Do not only copy and paste images without adding alt-text. Do not rely on color to convey information in a chart or graph.

11. Best Practice 3: Make Your Tables Accessible
Supports students who:
Have a learning disability
Are blind or have low vision
Do keep your tables as simple as possible and tag both column and row headers when they are present. Use table styles in Microsoft applications.
Do not make tables overly complex for readers if possible, or create headers only by altering the text or shading in a cell.

12. Best Practice 3 (continued): Make Your Tables Accessible

13. Best Practice 4: Make Your Links Accessible
Supports students who:
Have a learning disability
Are blind or have low vision
Instead of linking to the Affordable Learning Georgia Website Homepage located here,
link to The Affordable Learning Georgia Website Homepage.
(Do make your links describe where they are pointing to within the linked text for screen-reader purposes.)

14. Best Practice 5: Make Your Media Accessible
Supports students who:
Are deaf or hard of hearing
Are blind or have low vision
Have a form of cognitive disability
Are in a location where they cannot play or hear audio
Are not native-English speakers and need written-word formats to support understanding

15. Best Practice 5 (continued): Make Your Media Accessible
For audio, provide a complete transcript of speech content and relevant non-speech audio content (“A bulldog barks loudly in the background”). For audio within a video presentation, provide captions of all speech content and relevant non-speech content. For charts and graphs that are not addressed in spoken content, provide audio descriptions of the relevant visual materials.

16. Best Practice 6: Make Your Equations Accessible
For math equations as images or MathML, provide alt text or an “alt tag” for each equation. For example:
In MathML, ALT= “m equals begin fraction m sub 0 over begin square root 1 minus begin fraction v sup 2 over c sup 2 end fraction end square root end fraction”

17. Best Practice 6 (continued): Make Your Equations Accessible
LaTeX is not supported by screen readers. Instead, convert LaTeX to either an image with alt text or MathML with an ALT tag. Sometimes users may prefer audio. Consider playing an audio file describing the equation.

18. Best Practice 7: Make Your Colors Accessible
Supports students who:
Have low vision or poor contrast vision
Do use color schemes that contrast with each other between foreground content and background color. Be sure this also applies to web links, but the color needs to be different from other text.
Coblis: Color Blindness Simulator (for images)
Colorblinding: Google Chrome Extension
Spectrum: Google Chrome Extension

19. How can I get started?
When you are creating content, refer to your Information for Grantees page on the ALG site: Helpful links from Instructional Designer Katie Bridges and USG accessibility partner AMAC are provided on the page.

20. Using the Accessibility Checker
(Demonstration in PowerPoint)

21. Thank you! Questions?