Accessibility is key to ensuring success for all learners. Accessibility is also a passion and keystone in ISKME’s approach supporting access to knowledge. ISKME’s ongoing work in the accessibility space is demonstrated by our continued commitment to ensuring that our evolving OER Commons platform remains accessible to all users. As anyone who works in the area of digital accessibility can attest, maintaining an accessible platform is a job that is always in process. Over the years, ISKME has conducted two complete audits of the platform for accessibility, meeting WCAG 2.1 AA standards. As the platform has evolved, ISKME is now undergoing another thorough review of the OER Commons platform.
History of Accessibility on the OER Commons Platform and Partner Microsites
The OER Commons Platform comprises the global digital library of OER Commons, as well as our many partner-developed and administered “Microsites” which share the platform code and features but have been configured and contextualized based on their own unique or specific needs.
OER Commons, first launched in 2007, has continued to evolve to meet the needs of the open education community, as well as the needs of our partners. As ISKME’s understanding of accessibility and universal design for learning has grown, our approach to integrating accessibility into our development, user research, and site design has strengthened. User-facing accessibility practices on the authoring platform began in 2019 with the inclusion of an accessibility checker and the requirement that all images include Alt Text. Platform accessibility audits and remediation took place in that same year and again in 2021. ISKME has been active in several Federal and State level accessibility initiatives since 2014, which have informed OER platform and tool research and development over the past decade.
With an updated platform architecture and continued development of the platform, ISKME is now revisiting platform accessibility through a thorough, automated platform accessibility review using a combination of open source tools including Pa11y. Based on the findings in this scan, ISKME’s engineering team is remediating the site and addressing platform-wide accessibility. Once this remediation is completed, ISKME will continue with a manual audit of the platform and a subsequently updated Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT). This will be ISKME’s accessibility conformance documentation, regularly reviewed and assessed by the ISKME team.
Additional Open Author Accessibility Details
Open Author resources are OER that has been created and published within the OER Commons platform authoring tool. Built into the Open Author editor is an accessibility checker tool that allows OER creators and remixers to perform a check on their content and remediate as they go through the creation process. This does rely on authors to have an understanding of digital accessibility to know how to fix errors.
Open Author requires that all embedded images include Alt-Text and any videos uploaded to an Open Author resource are auto-captioned by ISKME’s video service.
When an author attaches a file to their Open Author resource, they need to ensure that their attachments have been built with accessibility requirements in mind.
It is the responsibility of the author and user of any resources on OER Commons to ensure the resource has met accessibility requirements.
Externally Hosted OER
The majority of resources indexed on OER Commons and ISKME partner Microsites are resources hosted by external content providers. ISKME’s librarians are reviewing content providers’ documentation to identify their accessibility statements. Accessibility statements will be appended to resources associated with content provider resources as they become available. If you have content indexed on the OER Commons or partner sites and would like to share your accessibility statement, ISKME would love to highlight that statement and to our users. If a user notices a resource that does not have an accessibility statement or that does not meet accessibility requirements, they can flag the resource by clicking the “report this resource” icon on the resource landing page and alerting the ISKME team that it needs an accessibility review.
You can review Content Provider accessibility statements in this OER Commons Help Article.
Accessibility Hub on OER Commons
ISKME developed the Accessibility Hub to support our community in the development and in the evaluation of resources for accessibility. In this Hub, you will find collections of openly licensed materials for professional learning that provide guidance on the remediation of OER for accessibility as well as accessibility models, example policies, and documentation.
As with all resources on OER Commons, the materials on the a11y OER Hub are free and open to anyone to use. You are invited to join the Hub by requesting approval to join our a11y allies Group.
Accessibility Checklist for Hub Content
ISKME created the Hub Accessibility Checklist, a tool to help Hub administrators check accessibility of their content (text, images, videos, etc) on their OER Commons Hub. While designed with Hub admins in mind, any user is welcome to use and remix this resource.
ISKME’s Professional Learning on OER and Accessibility
ISKME has a long history of offering support for developing OER that include accessibility practices. ISKME has partnered with CAST and other UDL and accessibility partners to develop and disseminate useful frameworks that can support content creators in developing accessible OER.
Our Commitment to Accessibility-Focused Initiatives
Ensuring platform and resource accessibility remains an ongoing priority at ISKME. As we continue to grow our platform, we will more deeply integrate accessibility checker tools for site administrators, Open Author creators, and end-users.
In the months leading up to the new Title II web rules and beyond, we are reaching out to public users of OER Commons users, as well as our Hub, and Microsite partners to help them proactively strategize for remediation of existing OER. Additionally, we facilitate knowledge-sharing with our partner community of practice to crowdsource tactics and engage in peer-to-peer support to ensure new OER are as accessible as possible.
ISKME librarians will continue to review resources for accessibility and will flag resources that are meeting accessibility requirements so that educators can select and curate resources with confidence.
As ISKME develops the next generation of the Open Author tool, we are looking toward a more granular approach to integrating accessibility into authoring, and to make the accessible attributes more visible to end-users and creators.