This document discusses accessibility issues related to open educational resources (OERs) in the context of the UK OER programme. It notes challenges in making OERs accessible due to unknown user contexts, lack of quality control when resources are repurposed, and inability to control access once deposited. The UK OER pilot phase aimed to follow accessibility guidelines but it was seen as an afterthought and prohibitively expensive. Barriers included a lack of skills and perception that materials were not "good enough" while enablers included using tools like the Accessibility Passport. The document recommends OER-specific accessibility guidelines and case studies to promote inclusive practices.

1. Accessibility issues in the context
of UK Open Educational Resources
programme
Anna Gruszczynska, C-SAP (Higher Education Academy Subject
Centre for Sociology, Anthropology and Politics)

2. Overview
• OER-specific accessibility issues
• Approaches to accessibility in the context
of UK OER pilot phase programme
(analysis of reports and other artefacts)
• Making a case for accessible OERs?
• Recommendations

3. OER-specific accessibility
issues (1)
Creation
• Unknown the context of the users of the resource -
potentially, OER creators represent a vast spectrum
from academics to informal learners
Repurposing
• Issues with quality control as an open resource could
be repurposed in a way which renders it inaccessible
Depositing
• Past the point of the deposit it is impossible to
control the environment in which the resource is
downloaded, re-used or re-purposed.

4. Accessibility in UKOER pilot
phase (1)
Accessibility issues were mentioned already within the
funding call for the pilot phase:
• [A]ll resources including the project web site [should]
meet good practice standards and guidelines
pertaining to the media in which they are produced,
for example HTML resources should be produced to
W3C html 4.01 strict (
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/
) and use W3C WAI guidelines to double A
conformance (
http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG1AA-Conformance).
Further advice and guidance is available from the JISC
TechDis Service (HEA/JISC, 2008).

5. Accessibility in UKOER pilot
phase (2)
• Not explicitly mentioned within the
OER Programme Technical Requirements which
focus on content, metadata and delivery
platform standards (Campbell, 2009) ).
• Not addressed with regard to depositing
resources into JorumOpen and the repository
platform interface has not been tested for any
accessibility standards (Siminson, 2010).
• Mentioned within the OER infokit, a wiki-based
resource produced on the basis of pilot phase
project outputs

6. Accessibility in UKOER pilot
phase (3)
• Accessibility as an afterthought and a labour-
intensive element of the OER workflow
• Accessibility positioned as aspirational only due to
cost involved:
• One lessoned learn was the cost of producing
transcripts to accompany audio and video files
and the cost of close captioning. Transcripts and
close captioning fall within best practice for
accessibility. Quotes received from prospective
service providers were prohibitively high and this
work was not possible under the allocated
budget (Savoia, 2010).

7. Accessibility in UKOER pilot
phase (4)
• Issues around terminology: focus on accessibility
understood as “open access”, that is, resources which are
open and free at point of use.
• Issues around academic practice: fear that materials are
not “good enough”; lack of time, “all or nothing”
perception of accessibility
• Positive examples of relying on Accessibility Passport/
Xerte Online toolkits
• Need to explore factors which might motivate OER
creators and re-users to embed accessibility within their
teaching materials for developing accessible OERs.

8. Barriers and enablers to accessible
OERs: business case
Parallel discussions – barriers and enablers for open
education
• Institutions will invest in developing accessibility-
related infrastructure, skills and knowledge if they
believe this will increase their competitiveness on the
market
• Business case for Open Educational resources assumes
that these materials will allow the institution to
showcase high quality teaching resources and thus
potentially increase its reputation
• Within that model, OEREs are a more cost-efficient
approach to producing teaching materials

9. Barriers and enablers to
accessible OERs: The power of the
open?
• Ethos of open education emphasises removing barriers to
educational resources
• Lack of control over the resource after release offers the
possibility to deliver customisable teaching materials,
adapted to the needs of individual learners
• CC-licensed materials can be transformed into alternate
formats more easily than materials published under all
rights reserved copyright – no need to incur extra
permission costs for adaptations
• Open education movement provides free access to courses,
curricula and pedagogical approaches not available locally –
by extension this might apply to positive approaches
towards accessibility

10. UKOER2: Communities of
(accessible) practice?
I would like to compile a separate “story” of
accessibility issues raised and tackled by each
project to feed back into the final reporting
processes as we go (...). With this in mind I would
initially recommend that when you update the
programme through your personal / project blogs,
please use the tags “accessibility” + “ukoer” (and
similar hashtags in twitter; #accessibility + #ukoer)
to enable me to gather them. I would like you to
add me to your social networks and share
experience back to the OER programme
(McAndrew, 2010).

11. Recommendations
• Produce OER-specific guidelines on producing,
repurposing and depositing open educational
resources alongside JISC TechDis guidance to best
practices in creating accessible teaching materials
• Promote tools such as the Accessibility Passport
and the Xerte Online Toolkit
• As part of awareness-raising, develop case studies
including actual model examples of accessible
resources in order to illustrate ways in which the
needs of diverse types of learners and users of
OERs can be met

12. Thank you!
• Questions? Comments?