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Accessibility in open educational resources is resilience

by Denis Shannon

Contributed by Ksenia Cheinman

Accessibility is for everyone. Some need it always; it’s a basic need. Others will need it urgently for some periods of time. And others will appreciate it without noticing. 

Designing open educational resources (OERs) with accessibility in mind is a gift of resiliency. It’s a gift to those who have diverse needs, to learning professionals who wish to reuse your resources and to your future self.

Design for all seasons of life 

In Canada, we have four seasons: winter, spring, summer and fall. If you think that only some people have disabilities, consider seasons of life. We all experience them. Some are predictable, like aging. Others can be unexpected like accidents or situational disabilities. One day we might find ourselves: 

  • pushing a stroller down a sidewalk without a curb-cut
  • managing a panic attack during a meeting
  • recovering from a car accident or an ear infection
  • using a mobile device with a broken arm or with our vision temporarily obscured by the bright summer sunlight

What if these seasons of life have been accelerated and amplified in our increasingly digital environments? How have you been affected as an educator? How have your learners been affected? 

Looking at disability with a broader lens, like the social model of disability, allows us to view accessibility as a way of being attuned to different life experiences. It encourages us to support different people in meeting their changing human needs:

“The social model of disability encourages us to understand disability as more of a spectrum that can affect different people in different times and in different ways. To give an example from education, when an instructor is lecturing, a blind student will need the instructor to verbally describe images used on the slides. But this verbal description also benefits someone who has a migraine and needs to keep their eyes closed or someone who is busy taking notes. It may also help all students better understand the images on the slides.” (OCADU, 2021)

Introducing accessibility considerations into your open learning resources is a commitment to resilience – to creating learning for all seasons of life.

Identify accessibility barriers

Where do you begin? 

Accessibility barriers in learning environments are a mismatch between learning offered and the learner’s needs. 

A good place to start is to reflect on what you’ve observed and how you have done things in the past:

  • Have you observed any unique needs your learners have?
  • Have you made any assumptions about your learners?
  • How have you made decisions about the format and structure of your educational resources?
  • Have you asked for and received feedback on your educational resources from colleagues?

If you would like to make note of your reflections, you can use this H5P interactive form to help you.

A screenshot of the H5P interactive form.

Strive for learning, not perfection

How can I help?

I am not an accessibility expert, but I try to be an ally. I play many roles in improving government services and advocating that they meet diverse needs. I believe that accessibility is crucial and I learn as I go. I make mistakes, learn from them, and do things better next time.

I hear professionals across many disciplines say that accessibility is overwhelming. There are lots of terms and concepts to remember and lots of changing rules. It is seen as too technical.

I encourage you to consider that accessibility is not about perfection:

  • Treat accessibility improvements as learning opportunities and set some time aside for them
  • Make small changes
  • Know that many accessibility improvements are not technical; you can make meaningful changes by using the skills you already have

Improve accessibility of your OER in 4 simple steps

Here are 4 simple things you can start doing today to design accessible open educational resources:

  • Fall in love with structure 
  • Use flexible formats
  • Provide alternatives
  • Use plain language

Each one is explored in a bit more detail next.

Fall in love with structure

Structure can take many different shapes depending on the format of your open educational resource. Structure is what helps your learners orient themselves in your learning product, navigate its various segments and understand how information is organized.

To do this: 

  • Create clear and descriptive titles and headings
  • Organize them in a logical order 
  • Group similar content together
  • When appropriate, reuse the same organization and headings across different parts of the resource 
  • Use pre-set heading elements in your software instead of bolding titles and section headings; screen readers need properly formatted headings to navigate content
  • Try exercises like reverse outlining to check if your structure makes sense

Who this can help:

  • “Goals and objectives mean far less to me than the steps that can get me there. I look for clues, patterns and sequences within information and actions.” 

– Experience of a person with Asperger’s Syndrome

  • A student who is under lots of stress and pressure may be scanning a course or a textbook for a section with important information 
  • A person using a screen reader to read-out headings so they can quickly get a sense of what a learning resource is about

What does it look like:

  • In this document, I use repeated structural components for each step to help recognition and reduce cognitive load. They include: To do this, Who this can help, What does it look like.

Use flexible formats

Before you begin designing your open educational resource or learning objects such as videos or infographics, consider how you will share them and in what formats.

To do this:

  • Avoid PDFs as these are difficult to make accessible and can be very hard for people who use screen readers to navigate (Nganji, 2015)
  • Use original document formats that allow learners to adjust font sizes and contrast, such as Word documents or PowerPoint
  • Use tools and platforms that are designed to be accessible and support the use of different assistive technologies such as Lumi to create interactive H5P content or Pressbooks for online textbooks
  • Do a quick search for the type of file formats you plan to produce and check if there are any accessibility concerns associated with them

Who this can help:

“The most common problems I come across are .pdfs, website resolution, difficult to find menus, and fixed colour backgrounds. .pdf files are a nightmare because you can’t customise anything. Not being able to enlarge fonts means you have to zoom in on the whole document and scroll around to read it. All that movement on screen is guaranteed to make me feel ill. With open document formats you can set background and text colours to suit, but that’s not possible in .pdfs.”

What does it look like:

  • This article is published in an HTML format which is easy for screen readers to navigate
  • I used Lumi platform to create an interactive H5P learning object that allows you to write answers to your reflections right on the website and then download a copy for keeping

Provide alternatives

Offer alternatives to the primary formats of your educational resources or learning objects to meet the greatest range of changing needs. Making sure that your resources engage more than 1 sense is a great start. 

To do this:

  • Include text formats to accompany video (as captions and transcripts), audio (as transcripts), images (as alternative text), tables or graphs (as descriptions and legends) 
  • Don’t use colour as the only indicator of difference, include other indicators, such as textures and clear labels

Who this can help:

“At university, Alexander had problems with some of the lecture materials, mostly when they contained graphs with colour-coded legends [, especially in charts where lines or bars] could only be distinguished by colour and not by different textures.”

– Experience of a person with colour vision deficiency

Martine, an online student who is hard of hearing, “can hear some sounds, but not enough to understand speech. […] Martine has encountered barriers when video and other media content are not captioned.”

– Experience of a person who is hard of hearing

What does it look like:

  • An image used to illustrate this article includes alternative text for those using screen readers: “Close up photograph of red berries on a branch covered in frost.”

Use plain language

Scholarly writing and plain language have not always been friends. Now is a good time for this to change., Simple and clear explanations of any topic are an incredibly effective way to overcome many accessibility barriers:

“A communication is in plain language if its wording, structure, and design are so clear that the intended readers can easily find what they need, understand what they find, and use that information.” (Centre for plain language) 

To do this:

  • Beak content up into smaller, logical chunks
  • Use headings
  • Use consistent structure (yes, again)
  • Use lists
  • Write short paragraphs and sentences
  • Test how readable your content is using free browser applications like Hemingway to quickly identify sections that might be hard to read

Who this can help:

“Simone struggles when there’s a lot of writing to read, or when the language is complicated. She uses audiobooks when she can.”

– Experience of a person with dyslexia 

  • “80% to 90% of students with learning disabilities [who] experience significant difficulty reading.” (Readability Guidelines, 2020)

What does it look like:

  • Here is an example of a plain language review of the 3 opening paragraphs of this article viewed in a Hemingway application.
A screenshot of the Hemingway plain language tool showing the "before plain language edits" pane on the left and the "after plain language edits" pane on the right.

While this H5P component is effective at comparing before and after, it is unfortunately inaccessible. As an alternative, I will describe what the screenshots shown convey. The “before image” shows that 2 out of 3 opening paragraphs were difficult to read. After I edited them and shortened sentences, all 3 paragraphs showed up as much easier to read.

As I mentioned earlier, you can follow these 4 steps without any new technical expertise. At the same time, in practicing these approaches, you could develop new skills and a stronger understanding of how tools and content affect one another. Your future self will inevitably become a more resilient educator!

Reinforce OER resilience

Allow me to leave you with a reflection. While open educational resources by definition allow reuse and in many cases adaptation, it does not mean that they are by default easily adaptable or reusable.

There are many considerations that would make a resource more easily adaptable. The same approaches you would take in making resources accessible would coincidently contribute to reusability:

  • Breaking learning into small components (via plain language and structure)
  • Using flexible formats that are easy to modify
  • Providing multiple formats for the same content 

For example, a video you created 5 years ago may be very dated in style and would not be easy to reuse. But a transcript from this video, which you created to improve accessibility, may be easily adapted and converted into a blog post or a new video based on the original text. 

You never know who will be reusing your content in the future. Incorporating accessible design will make it easier for others to reuse and adapt your resources. They will thank you for taking the time to do so! 

Resources you may find useful

References

The author, Ksenia Cheinman, in black and white, against a blank white wall.

Ksenia Cheinman is the Manager of Research and Strategy at the Canada School of Public Service working on an Open Learning initiative. She is passionate about improving public services through content and inclusive design, systems thinking and stewardship. You can find her on Twitter @altspaces.

This post is by Ksenia Cheinman and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, except where otherwise indicated. Please reference OER and Beyond and use this URL when attributing this work; for more information on licensing, see our Open Access Policy.