Accessing Open: Leveling the Playing Field for Students with Disabilities

In any given U.S. classroom, approximately twenty percent of our students have a documented disability. Still more may not have an official diagnosis but face other barriers to accessing learning. Open Educational Resources (materials that can be freely shared, reproduced, and revised) provide educators with an opportunity to reach the greatest number of learners through its flexibility and support of inclusive design decisions. After this session, participants will be able to see the nexus between Open Education and accessibility and begin to think about how OER and Open Pedagogy can help remove barriers to learning. Participants will also be encouraged to (re) consider our definitions of ‘access’ and seek to understand how Open Education aligns with intersectional approaches to social justice.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the classroom experience of students with disabilities
• Reflect on the potential of OER and Open Pedagogy to promote accessibility and help remove barriers

Accessibility in OER Design

Open Educational Resources are immediately more accessible than your typical resources due to the elimination of cost barriers, but there are more barriers to access than cost, and there is more to “open” than licensing.

This hands-on workshop will take you through some basic, practical ways to create open resources that are equally open and accessible to people with learning and/or physical disabilities. We’ll go through applications that most instructional faculty are familiar with—Word and PowerPoint—and we’ll go through an easy way to produce captions for your multimedia content in YouTube. We’ll also discuss aspects of more accessible images, web content, and audiovisual materials. This workshop will take you through the benefits of accessible materials from a position of nondiscrimination and inclusion instead of legal compliance.

By the end of the workshop, attendees should be able to:

• Create a resource that is more accessible to all people, regardless of ability, using a few common applications
• Advocate for accessibility within any educational resource program by educating on the value of accessibility and inclusive design

Open for Who?: Assessing the Accessibility of Open Textbooks

Presenters: Teresa Schultz, Elena Azadbakht

Proponents of open educational resources are quick to tout how they are accessible for everyone, but this definition of accessible means they are simply free. It does not include making OERs accessible so that anyone with a disability can still consume them. As the open education community seeks to reimagine itself, then we need to ensure that we include everyone. This presentation will discuss a research project that seeks to determine to what extent open textbooks on average meet a number of accessibility criteria based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). WCAG guidelines are an important standard for all online content creators and providers to work toward as they help ensure that disabled consumers can use and interact with online content. The presentation will discuss the results of the evaluation, including the problems most commonly found and which broad categories books were most and least likely to do well in. The presentation will help anyone involved with open textbook creation and adaptation determine where they can focus their efforts to ensure open textbooks are truly accessible for all. The data will also help to establish a baseline for the accessibility of open textbooks that the community can use to assess its own work toward making all open textbooks accessible.

Learning Outcomes:
Participants will: Understand how well open textbooks meet various online accessibility standards and discuss ways to incorporate this knowledge into their work