Clearing the Trail: Accessibility
The Role of Accessibility
Alex Keefover
In forests across California, deer move through dense underbrush and steep terrain with remarkable efficiency, creating trails that become highways for rabbits, foxes, and countless other creatures. These pathways aren’t designed with altruism – deer are simply solving their own navigation challenges. But the infrastructure they build serves an entire ecosystem.
Learning designers face a similar opportunity: when we create accessible learning experiences, we’re not just accommodating specific needs but building better paths for everyone. This chapter explores why accessibility matters through the lens of Alex Keefover, whose instructional design practice centers accessibility, and then through four essential truths: accessibility benefits all learners, it’s legally required, it reflects our personal values as educators, and most importantly, it’s achievable with the right approach and commitment. Like those deer trails worn smooth by repeated use, accessible design improves through practice, becoming not an add-on but the natural way we build learning experiences.
Why Accessibility Matters
Accessible OER: Now More than Ever
It is always the hope that as we go through time our world will become more accessible, both to people with disabilities and those with financial challenges. These groups have a tendency to overlap. However, the more time progresses, the less textbooks and other publisher-provided material are financially and physically accessible.
Fewer Accessibility Services, Higher Costs
The Access Text Network[1] that gave access to colleges and universities to alternative formats of publisher course materials for people with disabilities was shut down on April 1, 2024. Bookshare is now one of the only major services left to provide publisher textbooks in alternative formats for people with disabilities. Sure, people with disabilities can pay full price to buy or rent their books from publishers in accessible e-book format. However, this leaves an unfair advantage to students who do not need their books in alternative formats, as they can buy their books used at a much lower price than the full retail price. Without services like the Access Text Network, turning used books into an accessible format requires a lot of workforce that the modern higher education institution does not have. This makes used books, the cheaper option for students, unusable for many disabled students who need books in alternative formats.
Closing the Equity Gap
So, how do we close this equity gap? One way to do this is to use principles from the Open Educational Resources (OER) and the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) movements. When we think of OER, we often revise, remix, and/or redistribute. These three foundations of OER grant freedom to edit and deliver content for our students without obtaining permission from the copyright holder. When applying the concepts of UDL to creating educational material, one thing we look to do with our content is to provide multiple means of representation (Ex., visual, auditory, kinetic, and multimodal formats).
Thus, for our educational content to be as universally accessible as possible, we often need to convert it to multiple formats. Traditional copyright can prevent us from putting others’ content into different formats. However, if content is published as OER, we can revise and remix the content to be in as many formats as we need it to be in. Further, we can redistribute the content in these different formats, so others do not have to redo the work of making the content as accessible as possible.
In conclusion, we are in an age where financial and human resources in higher education are dwindling at a rapid rate. Along with this, services we once relied on for alternative formats of publisher course material have ceased, making it harder for disabled students to utilize cheap, used textbooks. However, there is another option. Using concepts from the UDL movement, we can create OER that can be freely converted to address any student’s need and later posted for any person with the same need. Thus, closing equity gaps caused by publisher-created course materials.
About the Author
Alex is an instructional designer for West Virginia’s higher education course-sharing portal, WVROCKS. His favorite part of his job is creating engaging and fun learning experiences for students. He holds a B.S. with a major in Mathematics and a minor in Computer Science, as well as an M.Ed. majoring in Digital Media, New Literacies & Learning. Currently, he is working on an Ed.D. in Instructional Design & Technology.
His professional interests include STEM in online learning environments, online formative assessments, new literacies/technology education, accessibility/adaptability in instructional technology, eLearning content delivery systems/authoring tools, macro-level instructional design, and data analytics in learning.
Read more about Alex’s work at Learning by Keefover.
Further Reading
- Hofer, A. (2015). “The Intersection of Accessibility and OER”
- Olsen, S.H., et al. (2022). “Disability Tax and Accessibility Tax The Extra Intellectual, Emotional, and Technological Labor and Financial Expenditures Required of Disabled People in a World Gone Wrong…and Mostly Online.” Including Disability, Issue 1, 51 – 86.
- Thomas, C. (2018). “OER and Accessibility: Working Toward Inclusive Learning,” SPARC*.
Accessibility Is the Law
Besides supporting all learners, as of June 24, 2024, by law, public institutions from early childhood through postsecondary are required to ensure their digital learning resources are accessible to students with disabilities. This final rule [Website], handed down in April 2024 by the United States Department of Justice, stems from the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The ruling outlines the technical standards (WCAG 2.1 Level AA)[Website] that these resources must adhere to and establishes a compliance deadline between 2027 and 2028, depending on specific population criteria. These requirements aren’t arbitrary mandates but codify our collective commitment to inclusion.
Accessibility is Personal
In the tasks of creating accessible learning experiences, we can forget that we are doing the work for our fellow humans. In the video below, students who use accessible technology describe what it means to them.
Game Changing Technology by National Center on Accessible Education Materials.
Accessibility Is Possible
Accessibility is a learnable skill. You do not need to be a technical expert or know how to code to make meaningful improvements to your OER. With guidance and practice, you can learn and master this skill.
Accessibility is a collaborative process. Teams often divide tasks, work with student co-creators, or use AI tools to support drafting accessibility components, with human review remaining essential. Some decisions, such as determining the purpose of an image, require subject matter expertise. These choices shape how future learners move through the content.
Unlike the deer who instinctively carve safe and efficient paths for themselves and others, we need some training to identify and create those paths. So, although accessibility is not a checklist, for those who are not accessibility experts, it can be helpful to begin with a checklist. Once you’ve had some practice applying accessibility standards, you’ll naturally begin to spot issues and complexities that fall outside of the checklist. The chapters that follow each cover one standard on our Accessibility-Checklist [Docx], which you can use to track your progress and identify areas that need attention.
Before publication, you will also create an Accessibility Statement to be placed in your front matter. This statement helps future users understand what to expect, much like a trail notice that shares conditions and limitations of the trail ahead. Guidance on creating an Accessibility Statement can be found in the Publishing chapter.
Trail Wisdom: Inclusive OER Design
Learn how one experienced open educator embraces accessibility in her OER design. In “Assessing Inclusive OER Design with DEIA and UDL Principles,” Surita Jhangiani [website], associate professor of Teaching and interim associate dean of Equity at the University of British Columbia, draws on her experiences with and research on open pedagogy, belonging, and critical digital pedagogies to integrate and assess student perceptions of diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism (DEIA) in OER using principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL).
Licenses and Attributions
“Why Accessibility Matters” by Alex Keefover is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
“The Role of Accessibility” by Theresa Huff and Karna Younger is adapted from “Doing the Work: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Open Educational Resources” by Veronica Vold for Open Oregon Educational Resources, used under CC BY 4.0. “The Role of Accessibility” is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
- ATNServices. (n.d.). Association of American Publishers. Retrieved May 9, 2024. ↵
