This guide supports UMD instructors and students with creating and using open educational resources (OER), affordable course materials, and open pedagogy.
OER materials have the potential to meet a wide range of needs and preferences, and we recommend designing for maximum accessibility as much as possible. The tools below will support you with building accessible practices into your workflow from the start. Please contact us for additional support.
Designed for OER creators, users, and adapters, the Accessibility Toolkit (2nd Edition) covers key concepts like universal design, organizing content, images, links, color contrast, and more.
PDF documents pose a number of accessibility challenges. Though widely used in academic settings, they're not mobile-friendly and they're more difficult to use with assistive technology. They also make it harder for other educators to adapt the OER content you create. We recommend creating text content with HTML/.docx formats instead (webpages, Google Docs, Microsoft Word) and only providing PDFs as a second option or when absolutely necessary.