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Open Educational Resources: OER & Accessibility

OER & Accessibility

While utilizing and creating OER is a great start to making educational content available to students, we must make sure that content is accessible to all for it to be truly open. Below is a checklist to get you started on ensuring OER you create or use are accessible.

Help with Accessibility

Organizing content

  • ☐ Content is organized under headings and subheadings.
  • ☐ Headings and subheadings are used sequentially (e.g., Heading 1, Heading 2).
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Images

  • ☐ Images that convey information include alternative text (alt text) descriptions of the image’s content or function.
  • ☐ Graphs, charts, and maps also include contextual or supporting details in the text surrounding the image.
  • ☐ Images do not rely on color to convey information.
  • ☐ Images that are purely decorative do not have alt-tag descriptions. (Descriptive text is unnecessary if the image doesn’t convey contextual content information).
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Links

  • ☐ The link is meaningful in context and does not use generic text such as “click here” or “read more.”
  • ☐ Links do not open in new windows or tabs.
  • ☐ If a link must open in a new window or tab, a textual reference is included in the link information (e.g., [NewTab]).
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Tables

  • ☐ Tables include row and column headers.
  • ☐ Row and column headers have the correct scope assigned.
  • ☐ Tables include a caption.
  • ☐ Tables do not have merged or split cells.
  • ☐ Tables have adequate cell padding.
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Multimedia

  • ☐ A transcript is available for each multimedia resource including relevant non-speech content.
    • Transcript includes:
      • speaker’s name
      • all speech content
      • relevant descriptions of speech
      • descriptions of relevant non-speech audio
      • headings and subheadings
  • ☐ Captions of all speech content and relevant non-speech content are included in the multimedia resource; this includes the audio synchronized with a video presentation.
  • ☐ Audio descriptions of contextual visuals (e.g., graphs, charts) are included in the multimedia resource.
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Formulas

  • ☐ Formulas have been created using MathML.
  • ☐ Formulas are images with alternative text descriptions if MathML is not an option.
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Font size

  • ☐ Font size is 12 point or higher for body text.
  • ☐ Font size is 9 point for footnotes or endnotes.
  • ☐ Font size can be zoomed to 200%.
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Attribution:

Accessibility Toolkit - 2nd Edition by BCcampus is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.