Research Guides: Open and Affordable Educational Resources: Accessibility

Accessibility in OER

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.

Creating Accessible Google Docs (University of Mary Washington)

Accessibility Toolkit for Open Educational Resources (CUNY)
A comprehensive guide to OER and accessibility
Accessibility Toolkit (BCCampus)
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.
Checklist for Accessibility (BCCampus)
Use this checklist from the Accessibility Toolkit to evaluate OER that you're creating, adapting, or reusing.
PDF: The "P" Stands for Problematic (Weave: Journal of Library User Experience)
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.
Experte
If you've made your OER publicly available online, you can use an auditing tool like Experte to make sure the content meets accessibility standards.