Accessibility in OER Publishing and The Digital Library Accessibility Policy & Practice Guidelines

1. Accessibility in OER Publishing & The Digital Library Accessibility Policy & Practice Guidelines 3.4.2024 Presentation for OEN’s Publishing Co-operative Advisory Group Jacqueline L. Frank

2. Agenda   Digital Library Accessibility Policy & Practice Guidelines       

3. Did anyone come with questions or topics you’d like to discuss?

4. Accessibility in the ideal world: Digital Library Accessibility Policy & Practice Guidelines https://zenodo.org/records/10045111

5. Best practices: Accessibility in Publications

6. Who’s Responsible?  

7. Common best practices  WCAG 2.1       Alt-text for images  accessibility checker   MSU LibGuide with Accessibility Guidelines Accessibility & Inclusion in OER  Accessibility Best Practices Tutorial (10 mins)

8. Document Formats       Example OER with multiple formats

9. Discussion: What has worked well for folks when implementing accessibility practices?

10. In reality: Accessibility challenges

11. Accessibility Challenges         

12. Discussion: What challenges have you faced?

13. Be kind to yourself

14. Thank you Feedback: bit.ly/JFeval Jacqueline L. Frank Jacqueline.frank@montana.edu Please attribute Jacqueline L. Frank with a link to the original presentation.

15. Time for questions Tea & sympathy

Editor's Notes

First, who’s responsible for accessibility? Generally, the creator or the author of the content is responsible for meeting accessibility standards. However, publishers also want to help publish accessible content, which requires knowing what to look for, and providing resources to authors if needed. And who knows, you may be authoring an open textbook yourself and need to follow these best practices.
We can’t cover them all, but here are some of the most common best practices from WCAG (web content accessibility guidelines form W3C), which is the industry standard.
...which include PDF, Epub, Audiobooks, Pressbooks, and many more. These all have different accessibility considerations, from the ability to enlarge text, reflow content, whether multiple columns are supported, and more. The main takeaway though is that you can usually save in a textbook in multiple formats from the original document, and it’s best to provide as many options as possible.
For example, EPUBs, which is short for electronic publication, and online/HTML versions have certain advantages over PDFs, including the ability to increase or resize the text size, and the text and content will reflow to be read within the browser window or mobile device. They also allow users to change font colors for contrast, and support vector images that resize without getting pixelated. PDF is one of the most common formats of course, which was created for the benefit of working universally across software & hardware, and stands for Portable Document Format. While it is hard to make PDFs fully accessible to screen readers and assistive technology, PDFs still have different advantages including that they maintain the original visual layout, which can be helpful for sighted users and is good for printing, and they can be available offline.
Well there are challenges no matter what type of institution you are at, but it can be more of a challenge to get authors to create accessible materials and textbooks than it can be to get them thinking about how to create more diverse resources. … In my experience I think this might be because people often think about accessibility as an add-on, or something to do at the end, so it’s great when you can promote having an accessibility mindset from the beginning whenever possible. However, with publishing OER, you don’t always have contact with authors until the end when they want to publish their content. And this leads to one of the biggest challenges I see which is time, both having time to learn about accessibility and the time it takes to create accessible materials, and the complicated fact that it never ends, because there is no such thing as being 100 percent accessible. I will say though, the ‘extra’ time it takes to make documents accessible decreases overtime as you get more used to doing it as an integral part of the process and think about it from the beginning. However, again when your on the publishing side, it is mostly up to the author to make their content accessible, and they might not have gotten to that point or have thought about accessibility at all up until that point. That’s because it can require a shift in thinking to get into an accessibility mindset, which requires both awareness upfront, and understanding of how to implement accessibility, which is what we are hoping to cover today. Finally, I see many folks fall into the trap of thinking it doesn’t have a big impact, and therefore might not be worth the extra time it takes. However, that theory can be easily debunked, and if you need talking points or resources to help with that, let me know.
We cannot be perfect at everything, nor is perfection the goal, because ultimately 100% accessible does not exist. And even thinking about accessibility is a great first step, and learning and incorporating new skills takes time. So remember to be kind to yourself, and practice self compassion along the way.

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Editor's Notes