OER Commons and ISKME strive to follow best practices based on federal requirements outlined in Section 508—the “Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility Standards,” authorized by the Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board—as well as recommendations of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
The focus for OER Creators and Users is the WCAG 2.1 AA standards. Our platform has features built in that can support you in creating accessible OER.
Section Headers - The Open Author tool has the ability to add Headings levels. The tool will automatically apply H1 to the Title of the resource and H2 to the Section Titles. Any headings added within your resource should be H3 or below.
Alt Text for images - When uploading an image, the Open Author will automatically prompt you to add Alt Text and offer the option for a caption. When pasting an image, you can double click on the image or right click to open the Image Properties dialog box for adding Alt Text. To mark the image as decorative, add the text of an open and closed quotation marks (“”).
Captions on videos - if you are linking externally to a video, please select only videos with existing captions that preferably have been corrected for errors. If you are uploading a video, our hosting system is designed to automatically generate and display captions. You can contact the Help Desk for support in editing the captions.
Descriptive Hyperlinks - please do not insert long URLs. When adding a link to a website, please type a description of the link (example ISKME homepage) and then highlight the text and use the Link icon in the toolbar to insert the URL.
Tables - please limit the use of tables to only data sets. If using a table, please include a title.
Additional resources can be found on the OER Commons Accessibility in OER Hub