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Pub101 is a free, informal, online orientation to open textbook publishing. This April 17, 2024, session is the second in our series this year. Host Heather Caprette of the Cleveland State University is joined by guest speaker Jacqueline Frank of Montana State University for a discussion of accessibility and inclusion in OER.
Watch the video recording of this session or keep reading for a full transcript. For those interested in reading the conversation that took place among participants and the resources shared, the chat transcript is also available below.
Note: If your comments appear in the transcripts and you would like your name or other identifying information removed, please contact Tonia.
Speakers:
Heather: Hello everybody. Welcome to the Open Education Network's Pub101 series. Thank you for joining us for today's session. I thought as an opener in chat, we could place where we're joining from. If you could tell me what kind of plants are blooming in your area, if you have a favorite flower or something that's blooming, I think that'd be nice to share.
Azaleas. Oh, I love azaleas. Coral bell. Oh, that sounds pretty. Granville, Ohio. All right. Tulips. Yes. I have some tulips blooming, too. Some really bright red ones right now with yellow centers. They're beautiful. Lots of tulips.
Okay. Well, thank you for that. You can go ahead and keep adding to it. I'm Heather Caprette. I'm from Cleveland State University where I work as an instructional designer. I'll be your host and facilitator for today. Soon I'll be handing it off to Jacqueline Frank from Montana State University to talk about accessibility.
As always, we'll leave time for your questions and conversation. We know that many of you may be experienced and knowledgeable about this topic in addition to our guests. We invite you to share your experiences and resources. Lots of people will post links and chat for others to explore.
Before I hand it off, I have to do some housekeeping details. We have an orientation document that includes our schedule and links to session slides and recordings. If you can't make it to a session and you want to know what you missed, please check out this document.
Please remember there's a companion resource to these sessions. It's the Pub101 Canvas Curriculum. There's lots of links there to resources and templates that you can use. We are recording this session and we'll add it to our YouTube Pub101 spring 2024 playlist. We are committed to providing a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for everyone aligned with our community norms. We ask that you please join us in creating a safe and constructive space. Finally, all the links to the resources just mentioned are found in one place, which I will copy and paste into our chat here. It's a link tree. With that I'll hand it over to Jacqueline to talk to you about accessibility.
Jacqueline: Yes. Hello everyone. I am going to share my screen and start this slideshow. Here we go. Thank you for having me. I am Jacqueline Frank. I'm the Instruction and Accessibility Librarian at Montana State University Library in Bozeman, Montana. I am happy to talk with you today about accessibility.
As a reminder, these slides will be linked from the course orientation document after today's presentation. We have a lot to cover today. We are going to start by first acknowledging that there are challenges related to accessibility. We're also going to cover the briefly note, the difference between accessibility versus universal design versus inclusive design and what they all have in common, and what it means to have an accessibility mindset. Why accessibility matters? Why we care and spend time thinking about this?
Then the bulk of our presentation will be digging into some accessibility best practices and some checkers that you can use as well as some different document formats that may show up in the world of OER, from PDFs to EPUBs to Pressbooks. Then talk about briefly models for ensuring accessibility. There are different ways that this can happen on different campuses.
Then a note about AI. I would love to hear more from everyone else along the way though about all of these different topics. Then we are going to end with some self-care reminders and as well as some resource and training options if you would like more.
First, I have a quick participant poll. I want to know what type of institution you are from. Are you from a university, a college, a community college, a state system, consortium, or other? Looking like lots of people have answered already. The majority, about 80% are from a university, another 13% from colleges, 10% community colleges, and then the rest consortium and state systems.
Great. I'll stop sharing and share those results so you can see them as well. Thank you. That is along the lines of what we expected, but just wanted to make sure. Starting by acknowledging some challenges, accessibility can often be seen as an add-on. This is one of the biggest challenges that I see as well as the time both to learn about accessibility best practices and how to follow them. Then the extra time it takes to implement those best practices and create accessible material.
The fact that it never ends, 100% accessible, doesn't exist. There is a lot of time that is involved in this and what works for one person doesn't work for everyone. This is a major challenge with accessibility and that will also never go away because we are all individuals and what works for me, it might not work for you. But there are some best practices that we can follow to make it the most inclusive and accessible as a starting place. That also allows users to maybe use assistive technology in ways that works for them because you've helped follow some of those best practices.
This ultimately requires a shift in thinking. We want to increase our awareness and understanding, because oftentimes some people think that it doesn't have a big impact, which we are going to debunk shortly because it really does have a big impact in the end.
Universal design versus inclusive design versus accessibility. These are a few of the definitions that are also included in your Pub101 course. These definitions are great. It says universal design is the process of creating products that are usable by people with the widest range of abilities, operating within the widest possible range of situations. This is trying to make something instead of having ramp and a stairs, we just only have a ramp so that people don't necessarily need to find an alternative to the stairs.
Inclusive design is creating a lot of different ways for people to participate so that as many people as possible can feel as though they belong. It doesn't mean designing one thing for all people. Going back to that same example, inclusive design would be offering both the stairs and the ramp so that people can choose the option that works best for them.
Then accessibility is the concept of designing websites, e-books, textbooks and other products in such a way that removes barriers so that people with disabilities can access the content. Accessibility is really focused on access for people with disabilities and that is important. As we will see throughout the presentation, accessibility, even though it's specifically designed and intended for people with disabilities, it also is useful for almost everyone in the end. Accessibility does benefit everyone.
Ultimately while there are some nuances between those different terms, accessibility, universal design, inclusive design, they all help us design content in ways that more users can access them and with more ease. That shared goal is really what we are concerned about today. Even though one might have a slightly different approach, they can be used in conjunction with one another to, again, just provide access to the widest range of people that we can.
There are a couple of guiding questions from the Pub101 course as well. When you're thinking about accessibility or universal design, thinking about who this book is for or who this OER is for, initially, does the book or OER present core concepts through visuals that maybe not all students could see or understand? Does the book present core concepts through multimedia, audio and video materials, that not all students may be able to hear, see or access? Does the book present core concepts in a document format that all students may not be able to access?
These are just some different questions that you can consider along the way to ensure that you stay on track and help present accessible material. Having an accessibility mindset from the beginning and why accessibility matters is important to understand because then you can help authors create accessible material and you can pass this information onto them if you get any questions about why you are asking an author to maybe update something for accessibility.
One of the goals of creating open textbooks or open educational resources is that they can be accessed by more people and with fewer barriers, not under a paywall. We also want to follow accessibility best practices so that again, more people can access them. Almost 20% of undergraduates report having a disability according to the National Center for Education Statistics. 26% of people live with a disability in the United States according to the CDC. But when we think about it, 100% of people will experience a disability in life if you are lucky enough to live long enough. Disability also increases with age.
Accessibility can be permanent, temporary or situational. Lots of times we think of access of disabilities as permanent. But sometimes if you are injured and have to have a knee surgery and are either on crutches or one of those wheelie scooter things, that puts you in a temporary disability state related to mobility. There are also situational disabilities where maybe you have your hands full and therefore aren't as mobile physically if you are holding a child or you just have a lot of things to be carrying around, for example. Accessibility is a spectrum. I'll also note here that a lot of accessibility or a lot of disabilities are invisible. The majority of disabilities tend to be invisible, especially on college campuses.
If we're thinking about the student audience that we are trying to reach through OER on my college campus, for example, the top three are ADHD, dyslexia and the broad umbrella for learning disabilities. All of those are invisible disabilities. Accessibility is also a spectrum. There are many assistive technologies, even from glasses and contacts to other devices like screen readers. We have mobility aids, hearing aids, all of these fall under the category of assistive technologies.
What works for one person again does not work for everyone. It is very individual, which again is a challenge. But one of the ways that we can combat that is by providing as many options and as formats as possible. That allows to choose what works best for them. When we're thinking about OER, one way to do this is to provide an open textbook in multiple formats, including an EPUB, an HTML, and a PDF option so that again, users can choose what works best for them.
I mentioned this already, but accessibility benefits everyone. While it is specifically targeted at users with disabilities, there are often benefits that benefit all users. For example, automatic door openers and curb cuts were the automatic door openers that you see at your grocery store and the curb cuts where it goes from the sidewalk and eases down to the roadside. Those were specific design elements for users with disabilities and we all benefit from those.
Headers. When you format something with headers like we're going to see, it allows users to navigate by section. Closed captioning allows users to view content without sound even if they do not have a hearing impairment. Transcripts allow users to read the content without video. That can be helpful without internet access or without the bandwidth to view a video. Again, 100% of people will experience a disability in life. We will all benefit from these at some point or another.
My chat went away. I'm going to pull up. There we go. Get my chat back just to make sure. Oh, I see a question. I love closed captions when I'm working at the reference desk. Yes. Exactly. You may not be hearing impaired, but there are times when you're in a loud environment or a quiet environment where you can watch the content and follow along. Yeah. I really like that.
Okay. Participant poll number two. Before we dig into the accessibility best practices. I want to know how much knowledge and/or experience you have with accessibility. Do you have zero? Would you rate yourself low, moderate, or advanced?
Okay. Share the results. Most folks have a moderate understanding, some are low, one zero and then a few advanced. Hopefully you will learn something new even if you are moderate and advanced. Also, please feel free to share your own experiences and resources in the chat. We could all benefit from learning from each other.
Okay. Moving on. Before digging into those specific best practices, I want to note who is often responsible for accessibility. Ultimately, the creator of the or the author of the content is generally responsible. However, that distributed model is challenging and we also as publishers or someone helping faculty publish OER, we want to help make sure that that content is accessible. That means knowing what to look for and providing resources to authors if needed. We'll also talk at the end about different models for ensuring accessibility. I'm interested to hear... We'll try to have time for this to hear how folks are handling this on their own campuses so that we can get a range of different ideas of how to approach this.
Some of the common best practices that we're going to look at. We can't cover them all. WCAG 2.1 now. Sorry. I thought I had updated this. But the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are a very robust set of guidelines and there are many more than the ones that we're going to talk about today. But these are the ones that are most important for OER. We're going to talk about headings, meaningful hyperlinks, considering color, captions and transcripts, language considerations, formatting considerations, and then alt-text for images.
Headings are a formatting tool. They are used to separate sections of a document. They ultimately help users and screen readers navigate the content easily and quickly to jump to specific sections and you apply them in an outline format. I have an image on the right here, which is showing a book laid out by chapters and then subsections for the chapter.
If we were to apply headings, the book title would be a heading 1 level. Then all of the chapters of the book would be formatted as a heading 2 level, and then all of these subsections under chapter 1 would be a heading 3, and so on. You can have as many heading levels as you want as makes sense. It just means that heading 3s are subsections of whatever was the previous heading 2, if that makes sense.
Headings act as a map of the textbook or a document. It's like a table of contents. Oftentimes if you are in Word or Pressbooks, you can create an automatic table of contents after you have applied these headings. As you add content and refresh them, all of it stays up to date with correct page numbers and everything as well.
The big point here is to know that you want to specifically format these as headings rather than faking them with a bigger and bold text and actually apply a heading style. Usually, I try to show in Word how to do this for example. But there are different publishing platforms. You might be in Word. You might be in Pressbooks. You might be in any number of different formats.
We're not going to specifically talk about the how. But if you would like to know how to apply headings or any of the best practices, please let me know and I can either answer that when we have questions or follow up with you afterwards.
Meaningful hyperlinks. We want to actually tell the user where the link is going to take them and avoid trying to paste the full URL and avoid using click here as a link. You really want to let the link be the title of the content itself. As an example, if you wanted to let users know that they can chat with a librarian from the MSU Library Homepage, you want to use the MSU Library Homepage as the actual link. Then that link will take them of course to that homepage rather than saying, "Click here to chat with us from the MSU Library Homepage."
The reason this is important is both for visual users but also for users who are using a screen reader. They can call up a list of just the links in a document. But if it's just a list of 12 click heres, there's no context as to where each of those is taking them.
Considering color. High color contrast is something that we need to make sure that we are following and don't rely on color alone to convey meaning this is in part due to people who are visually impaired or colorblind. If you only make some text red, for example, to try to highlight it as an important note, maybe also make it bold so that anyone who can't see color can have a separate visual cue of that being bold as well.
We'll talk about accessibility checkers, but I wanted to specifically mention that there are color contrast checkers and the one that I use is an actual download to the computer so that you can use it with anything that is showing up on your screen, whether it's a Word document, whether you're in Pressbooks, whether you're online somewhere or in a PDF. This is one option and I'll share some other options as well. Or you can also just stick with black and white and/or super dark colors on a light background or vice versa.
Captions. Captions are synchronous text versions of the spoken word presented within multimedia. The synchronous part is showing the captions at the same time that someone is speaking or that there is sound being presented within the multimedia. People benefit who have hearing impairments or people without access to audio. Or maybe you have access to audio but you are in a noisy or quiet environment, maybe it's too noisy for you to really hear and you don't have headphones so you can use the captions.
Or vice versa, it's super quiet and you don't have headphones and you don't want to play that content out loud. It also helps English as a second language users because lots of times people speak a lot quicker and it's easier to follow along in a written language. You can generate automatic captions for videos using YouTube. That's one option that is freely available.
There are many other options for uploading a video and generating captions or there are also some options for live captioning either in a PowerPoint or in Teams, a lot of Microsoft products, but there are other options for those live and automatic captions as well.
Oops. Then lastly, recording tips for captions. You may not be actually recording the material yourself, but this is something that you can pass on to maybe an author of OER if they are including any recorded content themselves. Speak clearly, slowly and close to a microphone and that will help those automatic captions as well.
Transcripts are a separate written document of the audio and these benefit people with vision impairments or people without access to video and they do not have to be verbatim accounts of the spoken word in a video. Sorry. My middle bullet point here somehow got ran together. That one's supposed to be a couple of different bullet points.
Yeah. These can be written beforehand. They don't have to be verbatim accounts of the spoken word in a video. It just has to convey the same content that was conveyed in the audio. These can be searchable by all users, which is super helpful. If you have a video as part of an OER or maybe the OER is a video, then having a transcript can help users search for a specific topic and then jump to that place in the video to go back or just use the transcript to review the content.
Some language considerations. In general, we want to try to be clear, concise and use plain language. That means avoiding or explaining jargon with different subject material. We all have different areas of jargon and oftentimes that is necessary. But explaining it ahead of time or having either a glossary or an index of terms can help users who may be unfamiliar or new to those terms.
Same with acronyms, spelling out acronyms. With OER the length will depend. The best practice is to first spell out the whole acronym and then put the acronym in parentheses. If you have a really long OER, then possibly spelling out those acronyms at the beginning of each major section might be a best practice and avoid abbreviations. Again, just spelling everything out so that users know exactly what you're talking about talking about.
Some other formatting considerations. Using a non-serif font including Helvetica, Veranda, Arial. The non-serif is easier to read, has been proven that especially on screens. A lot of OER these days are intended for almost all use on a screen. There are of course other formats that may be used, but a lot of times we're looking at the content on a screen.
Ideally, using at least one and a half times line spacing, this will again depend on your formatting. But just trying to optimize the white space and maybe just make it longer instead of trying to pack everything in on a small page. Using bullet points and lists can really help break up long paragraphs of information. If it does need to be presented in a paragraph form, just be generous with your paragraph breaks and try to break them into shorter sections.
Oh. I see a comment in the chat. What about Times New Roman? Yep. Times New Roman is a great font as well. Mainly the most common fonts also tend to be pretty accessible. Arial, Times New Roman, Calibri is another one. I think I'm saying that right. Just avoid all of the super fancy or super italic or ones with curlicues in general. You can also, of course, Google a font and see how accessible it is. But yes, Times New Roman is another great one.
I'm into App Donut, yes, you may or may not have noticed the default of Microsoft products has changed their default font, which if you notice those things, it made a big difference to me. Lastly, do not place text over images. This is really popular with memes these days or infographics. It's not saying that you can never place text over images. But ideally you would not place text over images just so that someone who is visually impaired can read the text easier.
If you do, if you do have an infographic, a meme, something else, then having alt-text, which we will get to is a secondary consideration for that. Bringing us to alt-text. Alt-texts are written descriptions of an image. They are read by a screen reader in place of an image when someone uses a screen reader. They are also displayed if an image file doesn't load properly. Or if sometimes on our campus here we have some protections in our Outlook email system where images don't automatically load from outside centers. That's just to help cut down on some spam or accidentally clicking on a nefarious link.
Sometimes there are just little placeholders and that alt-text might show visually to you or would be read by a screen reader if you're using one. There are longer alt-text guidelines from this online Accessibility and Instruction Guide, which is also included in the resources as well. But there are many ... This page has links from multiple other resources. The general alt-text guidelines are to consider the context, is it purely decorative? Then you can mark it as decorative and you don't have to add an alt-text. It will basically just be skipped.
If someone was using a screen reader, it would be like that image isn't there. Does it provide context or information? If so, you need to provide alt-text. We want to be as concise as possible. Usually that means one or two sentences. We don't want to repeat information provided elsewhere. If an image goes along with a paragraph and the paragraph is talking about showing a user in a classroom using a whiteboard, then you don't need to repeat that same information in the alt-text.
But anything that the user cannot glean from the text, that is what you want to provide as the alt-text. Try to be objective. Don't try to interpret or analyze the image, just explain it exactly what you see. Try to apply the same writing style and terminology as the surrounding text so that the tone ... That it just isn't a major shift in tone or jarring when the alt-text is read.
Then describing charts and graphs. This one in super complex images, there are longer guidelines for these, or if you are in math or sciences where you do have lots of charts and graphs, there are many more guidelines that we can dig into. But with this one, you can try to, again, describe the main takeaway of a chart.
A pie chart, for example, that's showing percentages, say the majority of people's favorite fruit is apples or whatever it is. Describe the main takeaway and then link to the full data from either that chart or the graph. That is a best practice so that people can then dig into the data behind that chart as well.
This I will say is one of the biggest challenges is learning how to provide good alt-text. A lot of times there aren't easy answers. Note that it's a challenge. It will continue to be a challenge. The author is usually the best person to create the alt-text because they are familiar with the content with why that chart or graph was included and can help provide the context of the image rather than a secondary accessibility person trying to glean what that context is.
Heather: Jacqueline, we had somebody make a comment. Sarah said, "I noticed in the Pub101 course that it mentions that the function of the image should be conveyed. I was wondering if that meant to articulate the intent, for example, humor, however that would involve interpretation or analysis. I think I need a better understanding of function."
Jacqueline: This is a great question and this is a great example of why I think the author is always the best person to provide the alt-text. Because as the author, you know if that image was trying to articulate humor or the intent behind it. Certainly, if that is the main intent of the image and that is what it is trying to convey to a visual user, then yes, that would be appropriate to include in the alt-text.
If you are reviewing something as a secondary set of eyes or maybe you are just reviewing it for accessibility, then I would say that would be something to clarify with the author if at all possible. Saying, this is the intent that I got out of it, does this match up? But yes, trying to think of the context, the context information or intent behind it and try to include that in the alt-text. I hope that helps. But again, there's no easy answer or a one size fits all. The answer is always, it depends.
There was a option to do a prior homework assignment to write alt-text for one of the images in this open textbook. I am actually going to bring this up. I think I shared my screen. Please let me know if you are not seeing the alt tag homework. I will scroll slowly down to the first image, which is a pie chart.
Here we have one example of alt-text, which is pie chart showing the numbers of undergraduate students in the United States in various demographic categories by age, enrollment status, and type of institution. For details, click here. Yes. This is a great option to give the overall intent of what this image is showing and then clicking out to the full data so that users could then access that.
One other thing I would add here is that looking at this pie chart visually as a visual user, I can see that it looks like about two-thirds fall into two categories of traditional students or, looking at the colors here, two-year students. I might just add that one piece of content to this alt-text. Roughly two-thirds are between traditional and two-year students, the remaining are such and such.
But alt-text is an art. It's not a specific science. There will never be a perfect answer. There are lots of ways that it can be good and you can say it in a lot of the same ... There are lots of different ways that you can say it and say it well. I'm going to jump down, scroll down to the next.
Here, one alt-text example says, "Classroom with students at desks and teachers speaking with the students in front of a projected image." That's great. Then another option, classroom with young students facing away from the camera, sitting at many desks, pushed together, instructor stands in front of the room speaking with a projection on the whiteboard behind him.
If you are not looking at the screen, it's kind of interesting to maybe hear these alt-text examples without seeing the image and seeing what it is conveying to you. Again, one has a little bit more detail, one has less, there isn't necessarily a right or wrong answer. But thinking about the context in which this image is placed and what it's trying to convey.
Lastly, there's one more. This one. The last one is a meme of sorts. The first example says this image presents six images representing different aspects of the experience of being a student. It is labeled the student experience described in greater detail here. Link out to a full description. This is a great example of how you can share briefly within that one to two sentence what it is trying to convey.
Then if the user wants more or needs more of the context, they can link to a fuller longer description. This is a good example when you do have lots of information to convey. Maybe the student needs it some of the time, but not all of the time. This can allow the user to choose whether they hear that full-on description or not.
The second example of alt-text for this same image is six images with captions representing the student experience from perspectives of society, friends, parents, professors, students' aspirations, and reality intended to be humorous. See full description at and include the link. Yeah. Those are both really great examples. If you link to the fuller detailed description, then it might be something that says the first image shows has a caption, what society thinks I do with a person at a party dancing.
Second image has the caption, what my friends think I do with an image of a ton of books stacked up and a basketball and a coffee pot. Third image has the caption, what my parents think I do with an icon for an A+ of great work saying I only am working on schoolwork and getting straight As. There are three other images included in this image if you're not currently looking at it, but I'll just stop there as an example. You could go on and describe them in fuller detail.
I see a question here. Would it be totally against the rules to make the alt-text longer to convey all of those images? No. It would not be against the rules to make the alt-text longer. You could do it either way. Again, that kind of comes back to ultimately the intent of it. If a short description allows people to move on past it to the content and not get too overwhelmed with a longer alt-text description. But it means that users would then have to click that extra link to get that secondary explanation.
No. You could certainly just outline and try to describe all of the six images that are included in this one either. That would be up to ultimately the author as trying to weigh those trade-offs and how you think the user will best interact.
With that, I'm going to jump back over. I'll give you some more time for alt-text homework if you want to try your hand at this. Then I will post some of my suggested alt-text as well so you can compare. I see another question. Is there a difference between alt-text and image description? No. They are used interchangeably.
Okay. We only have a couple more minutes left. I want to leave time for questions. Some of this I am going to speed through. But you do have access to the slides. I want to note there are many different document types for OER from PDFs, EPUBs, Audiobooks, Pressbooks. They all have different accessibility considerations.
Some are reflowable and change the font size. Some like PDFs, maintain the original visual layout. The takeaway here is that you can usually save in multiple formats. Trying to save an OER, this example, I won't open it just out of time, but I have an example here that is shown with an EPUB, a PDF, an HTML option. I know for example in Pressbooks you can export as an EPUB and as a PDF, same with Word. Just trying to provide as many options as possible will help users pick what works best for them.
We talked about a lot of these different best practices. But how do you actually ensure that these are met? You could take a centralized approach where one person checks accessibility and then helps authors update the content. But that means you have to have someone who's tasked with accessibility in your office. It may just be you. You may have a whole team of people. But it may just be you.
A lot of times there is a distributed model where authors are responsible providing the accessible content to you as the publisher is a person helping them to publish their content. Then you or someone else can provide resources to the author to learn on their own. But ultimately, it's up to the author to do the work and make it accessible or there's something in between.
I would like to hear how folks are handling this on their own campuses. If you want to put that in chat and/or save time during our questions and answers. Then accessibility checkers. I won't go too much into detail here. But there are options for accessibility checkers in Word. There are accessibility checkers for PDFs using the Adobe Acrobat accessibility checker.
There are some other web-based options. The WAVE tool is one of the most common ones that will check anything online with a URL. If you publish as an HTML or something like that. Then there are some browser extensions that you can use. I see in the chat there's one for Pressbooks. I'm going to include that in the future. Thank you for sharing that. A whole list of other ones for color contrast checkers versus if you are in Chrome or the WAVE tool will also do it. There are multiple options for color contrast, which aren't always included.
Here, they don't check everything. They don't always check color contrast. They don't check if headers are used, they don't check the reading order or the fact that you used jargon or acronyms.
Again, it's still a human element. While AI is a lot of these tools and checkers are built on AI, AI can really help with digital accessibility and I'm sure there will be new things in the future that we haven't even thought of. But the main takeaway is that a human is still needed to ensure accessibility. Please tell me if you have other AI-related tools or resources.
Lastly, self-care. You don't have to be perfect. Perfection is not the goal. It can't be since 100% accessible doesn't exist. But just try. We're trying to do the best we can, be kind to yourself, practice self-compassion. With that we do have more resources and training options that are included in the slides. You can always reach out to me. But what questions do you have? Was there anything else in the chat that I missed for questions or feel free to ask other questions too.
Heather: Thank you, Jacqueline, for that wonderful presentation. I didn't catch any more questions. I know that many of us have been sharing a lot of resources with each other and I think that's wonderful. If you can save the chat or copy and paste it into a document that might help you out.
We do have a Padlet activity. The Pub101 committee is going to revise the curriculum for OER authors. I'll share the link to our Padlet where we'd like you to share your thoughts about what you would like your OER authors to know about accessibility, formatting for accessibility, or the topic in general. If you haven't used Padlet before, go ahead and click on the link that's in the chat right now. It should open up a new browser window and look for today's topic, which is Session 2, Accessibility, April 17th, and click the plus sign next to the topic. It'll open up... Oh, thank you so much. I appreciate that.
It'll open up a sticky note where you can add your comments and then you would click the Publish button. Go ahead and give that a try. We'll just take a few minutes here to collect people's thoughts. Yes. The link to the slides and the recording will be in our orientation document. Let me give you a link again to our webpage that has that orientation document linked to.
Oops. I went directly to Karen. Let me send it to everybody here. There we go. Can everybody see that link tree? That's where the orientation document's at. Okay. Check. Oh, yeah. Somebody has a college accessibility resources department. Yep. Ours is not staffed heavily. I assume other people's aren't staffed very heavily either. It really does help for everybody to know about accessibility, how to format for accessibility, what to look for, how to use those checkers.
Yep. We can't be perfect. We will try our best together and learn from mistakes. Yep. Yeah. To think about accessibility first when you first start authoring. Yeah. Just some training and accessibility before you start is a wonderful thing to do. Yeah. Using accessibility checkers throughout creation, those are all excellent ideas and thank you for those.
If anybody has any more questions for Jacqueline, can you please post them in the chat? You can also raise your hand. I can call on you if you want to speak. Pretty quiet bunch. You guys know so much already, right? It was a good presentation. It was excellent. Thank you. Okay. D'Arcy. Yeah.
Jacqueline: There have been a lot of resources being posted. But if others have more resources or other tips for how it's worked for you, please put those in the chat as well. Where is the more detailed alt-text linking to? From my slides, if you were talking about that link, it goes to a lib guide that we have here at Montana State University Library, which is an instruction and accessibility best practices guide. There's a section for alt-text that then has multiple options for complex images, the general guidelines, et cetera.
D'Arcy Hutchings: I apologize. I don't think it was clear. What I mean is when we're writing the alt-text, you see more details at and that sort of thing. Where are we directing this to? I mean, assuming is this back matter in a book style, and what if it's not book style? I just was curious. Where are your recommendations for linking to, because a lot of this stuff doesn't already exist somewhere.
Jacqueline: Right. That could be in multiple places. Again, it depends. For example, on our lib guides, sometimes we have an infographic and underneath it will say, "See the alt-text." That clicks just to a separate lib guide page that is either included in the same lib guide and it just has another page that says, "Infographic alt-text."
Or I've also seen where people have just one big lib guide for all of their alt-text somewhere and then they link out to that. The short answer is you just have to decide where you're going to put it and what makes sense for your format, put it there and then get the link and link to it. If that is not an option because of the format, then just provide a longer alt-text in the context itself. Hopefully that answers your question.
D'Arcy Hutchings: Yes. Thank you.
Heather: Sorry. Kim Hale has a question too. She's asking about the cover in the back, if there are images too.
Jacqueline: If they are providing extra information, lots of times the alt-text could be for a cover image, could just be the title of the book and the authors just the text that is involved. If it's chemistry and there are some beakers on the front and you also want to tell them that there's a picture of beakers, then that's fine. But oftentimes the cover is decorative in a way that it isn't specifically conveying certain information. But if it is, then you can provide alt-texts for them as well.
Heather: Okay. I see applause coming in. Excellent presentation. We can certainly share the link to the YouTube presentation with our faculty authors also. Yeah. Okay. I'll be respectful of people's time, if there's no more questions. We just want to thank you again for joining us as we continue to learn about open textbook publishing.
We hope that as we continue to share available resources and recommendations, that one of your key takeaways is the sense that you're not alone in figuring out how to support open textbook authors. Next Wednesday we're going to have a presentation on inclusion and online publishing by Christina Trunnell. We hope you can join us next Wednesday. Thank you again, Jacqueline.
Jacqueline: Thank you, everyone.
Heather: Have a great rest of the day.
END OF VIDEO
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Pub101 is a free, informal, online orientation to open textbook publishing. This April 17, 2024, session is the second in our series this year. Host Heather Caprette of the Cleveland State University is joined by guest speaker Jacqueline Frank of Montana State University for a discussion of accessibility and inclusion in OER.
Watch the video recording of this session or keep reading for a full transcript. For those interested in reading the conversation that took place among participants and the resources shared, the chat transcript is also available below.
Note: If your comments appear in the transcripts and you would like your name or other identifying information removed, please contact Tonia.
Audio Transcript
Speakers:
- Heather Caprette (Senior Media Developer/Instructional Designer, Cleveland State University)
- Jacqueline Frank (Instruction & Accessibility Librarian, Montana State University)
Heather: Hello everybody. Welcome to the Open Education Network's Pub101 series. Thank you for joining us for today's session. I thought as an opener in chat, we could place where we're joining from. If you could tell me what kind of plants are blooming in your area, if you have a favorite flower or something that's blooming, I think that'd be nice to share.
Azaleas. Oh, I love azaleas. Coral bell. Oh, that sounds pretty. Granville, Ohio. All right. Tulips. Yes. I have some tulips blooming, too. Some really bright red ones right now with yellow centers. They're beautiful. Lots of tulips.
Okay. Well, thank you for that. You can go ahead and keep adding to it. I'm Heather Caprette. I'm from Cleveland State University where I work as an instructional designer. I'll be your host and facilitator for today. Soon I'll be handing it off to Jacqueline Frank from Montana State University to talk about accessibility.
As always, we'll leave time for your questions and conversation. We know that many of you may be experienced and knowledgeable about this topic in addition to our guests. We invite you to share your experiences and resources. Lots of people will post links and chat for others to explore.
Before I hand it off, I have to do some housekeeping details. We have an orientation document that includes our schedule and links to session slides and recordings. If you can't make it to a session and you want to know what you missed, please check out this document.
Please remember there's a companion resource to these sessions. It's the Pub101 Canvas Curriculum. There's lots of links there to resources and templates that you can use. We are recording this session and we'll add it to our YouTube Pub101 spring 2024 playlist. We are committed to providing a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for everyone aligned with our community norms. We ask that you please join us in creating a safe and constructive space. Finally, all the links to the resources just mentioned are found in one place, which I will copy and paste into our chat here. It's a link tree. With that I'll hand it over to Jacqueline to talk to you about accessibility.
Jacqueline: Yes. Hello everyone. I am going to share my screen and start this slideshow. Here we go. Thank you for having me. I am Jacqueline Frank. I'm the Instruction and Accessibility Librarian at Montana State University Library in Bozeman, Montana. I am happy to talk with you today about accessibility.
As a reminder, these slides will be linked from the course orientation document after today's presentation. We have a lot to cover today. We are going to start by first acknowledging that there are challenges related to accessibility. We're also going to cover the briefly note, the difference between accessibility versus universal design versus inclusive design and what they all have in common, and what it means to have an accessibility mindset. Why accessibility matters? Why we care and spend time thinking about this?
Then the bulk of our presentation will be digging into some accessibility best practices and some checkers that you can use as well as some different document formats that may show up in the world of OER, from PDFs to EPUBs to Pressbooks. Then talk about briefly models for ensuring accessibility. There are different ways that this can happen on different campuses.
Then a note about AI. I would love to hear more from everyone else along the way though about all of these different topics. Then we are going to end with some self-care reminders and as well as some resource and training options if you would like more.
First, I have a quick participant poll. I want to know what type of institution you are from. Are you from a university, a college, a community college, a state system, consortium, or other? Looking like lots of people have answered already. The majority, about 80% are from a university, another 13% from colleges, 10% community colleges, and then the rest consortium and state systems.
Great. I'll stop sharing and share those results so you can see them as well. Thank you. That is along the lines of what we expected, but just wanted to make sure. Starting by acknowledging some challenges, accessibility can often be seen as an add-on. This is one of the biggest challenges that I see as well as the time both to learn about accessibility best practices and how to follow them. Then the extra time it takes to implement those best practices and create accessible material.
The fact that it never ends, 100% accessible, doesn't exist. There is a lot of time that is involved in this and what works for one person doesn't work for everyone. This is a major challenge with accessibility and that will also never go away because we are all individuals and what works for me, it might not work for you. But there are some best practices that we can follow to make it the most inclusive and accessible as a starting place. That also allows users to maybe use assistive technology in ways that works for them because you've helped follow some of those best practices.
This ultimately requires a shift in thinking. We want to increase our awareness and understanding, because oftentimes some people think that it doesn't have a big impact, which we are going to debunk shortly because it really does have a big impact in the end.
Universal design versus inclusive design versus accessibility. These are a few of the definitions that are also included in your Pub101 course. These definitions are great. It says universal design is the process of creating products that are usable by people with the widest range of abilities, operating within the widest possible range of situations. This is trying to make something instead of having ramp and a stairs, we just only have a ramp so that people don't necessarily need to find an alternative to the stairs.
Inclusive design is creating a lot of different ways for people to participate so that as many people as possible can feel as though they belong. It doesn't mean designing one thing for all people. Going back to that same example, inclusive design would be offering both the stairs and the ramp so that people can choose the option that works best for them.
Then accessibility is the concept of designing websites, e-books, textbooks and other products in such a way that removes barriers so that people with disabilities can access the content. Accessibility is really focused on access for people with disabilities and that is important. As we will see throughout the presentation, accessibility, even though it's specifically designed and intended for people with disabilities, it also is useful for almost everyone in the end. Accessibility does benefit everyone.
Ultimately while there are some nuances between those different terms, accessibility, universal design, inclusive design, they all help us design content in ways that more users can access them and with more ease. That shared goal is really what we are concerned about today. Even though one might have a slightly different approach, they can be used in conjunction with one another to, again, just provide access to the widest range of people that we can.
There are a couple of guiding questions from the Pub101 course as well. When you're thinking about accessibility or universal design, thinking about who this book is for or who this OER is for, initially, does the book or OER present core concepts through visuals that maybe not all students could see or understand? Does the book present core concepts through multimedia, audio and video materials, that not all students may be able to hear, see or access? Does the book present core concepts in a document format that all students may not be able to access?
These are just some different questions that you can consider along the way to ensure that you stay on track and help present accessible material. Having an accessibility mindset from the beginning and why accessibility matters is important to understand because then you can help authors create accessible material and you can pass this information onto them if you get any questions about why you are asking an author to maybe update something for accessibility.
One of the goals of creating open textbooks or open educational resources is that they can be accessed by more people and with fewer barriers, not under a paywall. We also want to follow accessibility best practices so that again, more people can access them. Almost 20% of undergraduates report having a disability according to the National Center for Education Statistics. 26% of people live with a disability in the United States according to the CDC. But when we think about it, 100% of people will experience a disability in life if you are lucky enough to live long enough. Disability also increases with age.
Accessibility can be permanent, temporary or situational. Lots of times we think of access of disabilities as permanent. But sometimes if you are injured and have to have a knee surgery and are either on crutches or one of those wheelie scooter things, that puts you in a temporary disability state related to mobility. There are also situational disabilities where maybe you have your hands full and therefore aren't as mobile physically if you are holding a child or you just have a lot of things to be carrying around, for example. Accessibility is a spectrum. I'll also note here that a lot of accessibility or a lot of disabilities are invisible. The majority of disabilities tend to be invisible, especially on college campuses.
If we're thinking about the student audience that we are trying to reach through OER on my college campus, for example, the top three are ADHD, dyslexia and the broad umbrella for learning disabilities. All of those are invisible disabilities. Accessibility is also a spectrum. There are many assistive technologies, even from glasses and contacts to other devices like screen readers. We have mobility aids, hearing aids, all of these fall under the category of assistive technologies.
What works for one person again does not work for everyone. It is very individual, which again is a challenge. But one of the ways that we can combat that is by providing as many options and as formats as possible. That allows to choose what works best for them. When we're thinking about OER, one way to do this is to provide an open textbook in multiple formats, including an EPUB, an HTML, and a PDF option so that again, users can choose what works best for them.
I mentioned this already, but accessibility benefits everyone. While it is specifically targeted at users with disabilities, there are often benefits that benefit all users. For example, automatic door openers and curb cuts were the automatic door openers that you see at your grocery store and the curb cuts where it goes from the sidewalk and eases down to the roadside. Those were specific design elements for users with disabilities and we all benefit from those.
Headers. When you format something with headers like we're going to see, it allows users to navigate by section. Closed captioning allows users to view content without sound even if they do not have a hearing impairment. Transcripts allow users to read the content without video. That can be helpful without internet access or without the bandwidth to view a video. Again, 100% of people will experience a disability in life. We will all benefit from these at some point or another.
My chat went away. I'm going to pull up. There we go. Get my chat back just to make sure. Oh, I see a question. I love closed captions when I'm working at the reference desk. Yes. Exactly. You may not be hearing impaired, but there are times when you're in a loud environment or a quiet environment where you can watch the content and follow along. Yeah. I really like that.
Okay. Participant poll number two. Before we dig into the accessibility best practices. I want to know how much knowledge and/or experience you have with accessibility. Do you have zero? Would you rate yourself low, moderate, or advanced?
Okay. Share the results. Most folks have a moderate understanding, some are low, one zero and then a few advanced. Hopefully you will learn something new even if you are moderate and advanced. Also, please feel free to share your own experiences and resources in the chat. We could all benefit from learning from each other.
Okay. Moving on. Before digging into those specific best practices, I want to note who is often responsible for accessibility. Ultimately, the creator of the or the author of the content is generally responsible. However, that distributed model is challenging and we also as publishers or someone helping faculty publish OER, we want to help make sure that that content is accessible. That means knowing what to look for and providing resources to authors if needed. We'll also talk at the end about different models for ensuring accessibility. I'm interested to hear... We'll try to have time for this to hear how folks are handling this on their own campuses so that we can get a range of different ideas of how to approach this.
Some of the common best practices that we're going to look at. We can't cover them all. WCAG 2.1 now. Sorry. I thought I had updated this. But the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are a very robust set of guidelines and there are many more than the ones that we're going to talk about today. But these are the ones that are most important for OER. We're going to talk about headings, meaningful hyperlinks, considering color, captions and transcripts, language considerations, formatting considerations, and then alt-text for images.
Headings are a formatting tool. They are used to separate sections of a document. They ultimately help users and screen readers navigate the content easily and quickly to jump to specific sections and you apply them in an outline format. I have an image on the right here, which is showing a book laid out by chapters and then subsections for the chapter.
If we were to apply headings, the book title would be a heading 1 level. Then all of the chapters of the book would be formatted as a heading 2 level, and then all of these subsections under chapter 1 would be a heading 3, and so on. You can have as many heading levels as you want as makes sense. It just means that heading 3s are subsections of whatever was the previous heading 2, if that makes sense.
Headings act as a map of the textbook or a document. It's like a table of contents. Oftentimes if you are in Word or Pressbooks, you can create an automatic table of contents after you have applied these headings. As you add content and refresh them, all of it stays up to date with correct page numbers and everything as well.
The big point here is to know that you want to specifically format these as headings rather than faking them with a bigger and bold text and actually apply a heading style. Usually, I try to show in Word how to do this for example. But there are different publishing platforms. You might be in Word. You might be in Pressbooks. You might be in any number of different formats.
We're not going to specifically talk about the how. But if you would like to know how to apply headings or any of the best practices, please let me know and I can either answer that when we have questions or follow up with you afterwards.
Meaningful hyperlinks. We want to actually tell the user where the link is going to take them and avoid trying to paste the full URL and avoid using click here as a link. You really want to let the link be the title of the content itself. As an example, if you wanted to let users know that they can chat with a librarian from the MSU Library Homepage, you want to use the MSU Library Homepage as the actual link. Then that link will take them of course to that homepage rather than saying, "Click here to chat with us from the MSU Library Homepage."
The reason this is important is both for visual users but also for users who are using a screen reader. They can call up a list of just the links in a document. But if it's just a list of 12 click heres, there's no context as to where each of those is taking them.
Considering color. High color contrast is something that we need to make sure that we are following and don't rely on color alone to convey meaning this is in part due to people who are visually impaired or colorblind. If you only make some text red, for example, to try to highlight it as an important note, maybe also make it bold so that anyone who can't see color can have a separate visual cue of that being bold as well.
We'll talk about accessibility checkers, but I wanted to specifically mention that there are color contrast checkers and the one that I use is an actual download to the computer so that you can use it with anything that is showing up on your screen, whether it's a Word document, whether you're in Pressbooks, whether you're online somewhere or in a PDF. This is one option and I'll share some other options as well. Or you can also just stick with black and white and/or super dark colors on a light background or vice versa.
Captions. Captions are synchronous text versions of the spoken word presented within multimedia. The synchronous part is showing the captions at the same time that someone is speaking or that there is sound being presented within the multimedia. People benefit who have hearing impairments or people without access to audio. Or maybe you have access to audio but you are in a noisy or quiet environment, maybe it's too noisy for you to really hear and you don't have headphones so you can use the captions.
Or vice versa, it's super quiet and you don't have headphones and you don't want to play that content out loud. It also helps English as a second language users because lots of times people speak a lot quicker and it's easier to follow along in a written language. You can generate automatic captions for videos using YouTube. That's one option that is freely available.
There are many other options for uploading a video and generating captions or there are also some options for live captioning either in a PowerPoint or in Teams, a lot of Microsoft products, but there are other options for those live and automatic captions as well.
Oops. Then lastly, recording tips for captions. You may not be actually recording the material yourself, but this is something that you can pass on to maybe an author of OER if they are including any recorded content themselves. Speak clearly, slowly and close to a microphone and that will help those automatic captions as well.
Transcripts are a separate written document of the audio and these benefit people with vision impairments or people without access to video and they do not have to be verbatim accounts of the spoken word in a video. Sorry. My middle bullet point here somehow got ran together. That one's supposed to be a couple of different bullet points.
Yeah. These can be written beforehand. They don't have to be verbatim accounts of the spoken word in a video. It just has to convey the same content that was conveyed in the audio. These can be searchable by all users, which is super helpful. If you have a video as part of an OER or maybe the OER is a video, then having a transcript can help users search for a specific topic and then jump to that place in the video to go back or just use the transcript to review the content.
Some language considerations. In general, we want to try to be clear, concise and use plain language. That means avoiding or explaining jargon with different subject material. We all have different areas of jargon and oftentimes that is necessary. But explaining it ahead of time or having either a glossary or an index of terms can help users who may be unfamiliar or new to those terms.
Same with acronyms, spelling out acronyms. With OER the length will depend. The best practice is to first spell out the whole acronym and then put the acronym in parentheses. If you have a really long OER, then possibly spelling out those acronyms at the beginning of each major section might be a best practice and avoid abbreviations. Again, just spelling everything out so that users know exactly what you're talking about talking about.
Some other formatting considerations. Using a non-serif font including Helvetica, Veranda, Arial. The non-serif is easier to read, has been proven that especially on screens. A lot of OER these days are intended for almost all use on a screen. There are of course other formats that may be used, but a lot of times we're looking at the content on a screen.
Ideally, using at least one and a half times line spacing, this will again depend on your formatting. But just trying to optimize the white space and maybe just make it longer instead of trying to pack everything in on a small page. Using bullet points and lists can really help break up long paragraphs of information. If it does need to be presented in a paragraph form, just be generous with your paragraph breaks and try to break them into shorter sections.
Oh. I see a comment in the chat. What about Times New Roman? Yep. Times New Roman is a great font as well. Mainly the most common fonts also tend to be pretty accessible. Arial, Times New Roman, Calibri is another one. I think I'm saying that right. Just avoid all of the super fancy or super italic or ones with curlicues in general. You can also, of course, Google a font and see how accessible it is. But yes, Times New Roman is another great one.
I'm into App Donut, yes, you may or may not have noticed the default of Microsoft products has changed their default font, which if you notice those things, it made a big difference to me. Lastly, do not place text over images. This is really popular with memes these days or infographics. It's not saying that you can never place text over images. But ideally you would not place text over images just so that someone who is visually impaired can read the text easier.
If you do, if you do have an infographic, a meme, something else, then having alt-text, which we will get to is a secondary consideration for that. Bringing us to alt-text. Alt-texts are written descriptions of an image. They are read by a screen reader in place of an image when someone uses a screen reader. They are also displayed if an image file doesn't load properly. Or if sometimes on our campus here we have some protections in our Outlook email system where images don't automatically load from outside centers. That's just to help cut down on some spam or accidentally clicking on a nefarious link.
Sometimes there are just little placeholders and that alt-text might show visually to you or would be read by a screen reader if you're using one. There are longer alt-text guidelines from this online Accessibility and Instruction Guide, which is also included in the resources as well. But there are many ... This page has links from multiple other resources. The general alt-text guidelines are to consider the context, is it purely decorative? Then you can mark it as decorative and you don't have to add an alt-text. It will basically just be skipped.
If someone was using a screen reader, it would be like that image isn't there. Does it provide context or information? If so, you need to provide alt-text. We want to be as concise as possible. Usually that means one or two sentences. We don't want to repeat information provided elsewhere. If an image goes along with a paragraph and the paragraph is talking about showing a user in a classroom using a whiteboard, then you don't need to repeat that same information in the alt-text.
But anything that the user cannot glean from the text, that is what you want to provide as the alt-text. Try to be objective. Don't try to interpret or analyze the image, just explain it exactly what you see. Try to apply the same writing style and terminology as the surrounding text so that the tone ... That it just isn't a major shift in tone or jarring when the alt-text is read.
Then describing charts and graphs. This one in super complex images, there are longer guidelines for these, or if you are in math or sciences where you do have lots of charts and graphs, there are many more guidelines that we can dig into. But with this one, you can try to, again, describe the main takeaway of a chart.
A pie chart, for example, that's showing percentages, say the majority of people's favorite fruit is apples or whatever it is. Describe the main takeaway and then link to the full data from either that chart or the graph. That is a best practice so that people can then dig into the data behind that chart as well.
This I will say is one of the biggest challenges is learning how to provide good alt-text. A lot of times there aren't easy answers. Note that it's a challenge. It will continue to be a challenge. The author is usually the best person to create the alt-text because they are familiar with the content with why that chart or graph was included and can help provide the context of the image rather than a secondary accessibility person trying to glean what that context is.
Heather: Jacqueline, we had somebody make a comment. Sarah said, "I noticed in the Pub101 course that it mentions that the function of the image should be conveyed. I was wondering if that meant to articulate the intent, for example, humor, however that would involve interpretation or analysis. I think I need a better understanding of function."
Jacqueline: This is a great question and this is a great example of why I think the author is always the best person to provide the alt-text. Because as the author, you know if that image was trying to articulate humor or the intent behind it. Certainly, if that is the main intent of the image and that is what it is trying to convey to a visual user, then yes, that would be appropriate to include in the alt-text.
If you are reviewing something as a secondary set of eyes or maybe you are just reviewing it for accessibility, then I would say that would be something to clarify with the author if at all possible. Saying, this is the intent that I got out of it, does this match up? But yes, trying to think of the context, the context information or intent behind it and try to include that in the alt-text. I hope that helps. But again, there's no easy answer or a one size fits all. The answer is always, it depends.
There was a option to do a prior homework assignment to write alt-text for one of the images in this open textbook. I am actually going to bring this up. I think I shared my screen. Please let me know if you are not seeing the alt tag homework. I will scroll slowly down to the first image, which is a pie chart.
Here we have one example of alt-text, which is pie chart showing the numbers of undergraduate students in the United States in various demographic categories by age, enrollment status, and type of institution. For details, click here. Yes. This is a great option to give the overall intent of what this image is showing and then clicking out to the full data so that users could then access that.
One other thing I would add here is that looking at this pie chart visually as a visual user, I can see that it looks like about two-thirds fall into two categories of traditional students or, looking at the colors here, two-year students. I might just add that one piece of content to this alt-text. Roughly two-thirds are between traditional and two-year students, the remaining are such and such.
But alt-text is an art. It's not a specific science. There will never be a perfect answer. There are lots of ways that it can be good and you can say it in a lot of the same ... There are lots of different ways that you can say it and say it well. I'm going to jump down, scroll down to the next.
Here, one alt-text example says, "Classroom with students at desks and teachers speaking with the students in front of a projected image." That's great. Then another option, classroom with young students facing away from the camera, sitting at many desks, pushed together, instructor stands in front of the room speaking with a projection on the whiteboard behind him.
If you are not looking at the screen, it's kind of interesting to maybe hear these alt-text examples without seeing the image and seeing what it is conveying to you. Again, one has a little bit more detail, one has less, there isn't necessarily a right or wrong answer. But thinking about the context in which this image is placed and what it's trying to convey.
Lastly, there's one more. This one. The last one is a meme of sorts. The first example says this image presents six images representing different aspects of the experience of being a student. It is labeled the student experience described in greater detail here. Link out to a full description. This is a great example of how you can share briefly within that one to two sentence what it is trying to convey.
Then if the user wants more or needs more of the context, they can link to a fuller longer description. This is a good example when you do have lots of information to convey. Maybe the student needs it some of the time, but not all of the time. This can allow the user to choose whether they hear that full-on description or not.
The second example of alt-text for this same image is six images with captions representing the student experience from perspectives of society, friends, parents, professors, students' aspirations, and reality intended to be humorous. See full description at and include the link. Yeah. Those are both really great examples. If you link to the fuller detailed description, then it might be something that says the first image shows has a caption, what society thinks I do with a person at a party dancing.
Second image has the caption, what my friends think I do with an image of a ton of books stacked up and a basketball and a coffee pot. Third image has the caption, what my parents think I do with an icon for an A+ of great work saying I only am working on schoolwork and getting straight As. There are three other images included in this image if you're not currently looking at it, but I'll just stop there as an example. You could go on and describe them in fuller detail.
I see a question here. Would it be totally against the rules to make the alt-text longer to convey all of those images? No. It would not be against the rules to make the alt-text longer. You could do it either way. Again, that kind of comes back to ultimately the intent of it. If a short description allows people to move on past it to the content and not get too overwhelmed with a longer alt-text description. But it means that users would then have to click that extra link to get that secondary explanation.
No. You could certainly just outline and try to describe all of the six images that are included in this one either. That would be up to ultimately the author as trying to weigh those trade-offs and how you think the user will best interact.
With that, I'm going to jump back over. I'll give you some more time for alt-text homework if you want to try your hand at this. Then I will post some of my suggested alt-text as well so you can compare. I see another question. Is there a difference between alt-text and image description? No. They are used interchangeably.
Okay. We only have a couple more minutes left. I want to leave time for questions. Some of this I am going to speed through. But you do have access to the slides. I want to note there are many different document types for OER from PDFs, EPUBs, Audiobooks, Pressbooks. They all have different accessibility considerations.
Some are reflowable and change the font size. Some like PDFs, maintain the original visual layout. The takeaway here is that you can usually save in multiple formats. Trying to save an OER, this example, I won't open it just out of time, but I have an example here that is shown with an EPUB, a PDF, an HTML option. I know for example in Pressbooks you can export as an EPUB and as a PDF, same with Word. Just trying to provide as many options as possible will help users pick what works best for them.
We talked about a lot of these different best practices. But how do you actually ensure that these are met? You could take a centralized approach where one person checks accessibility and then helps authors update the content. But that means you have to have someone who's tasked with accessibility in your office. It may just be you. You may have a whole team of people. But it may just be you.
A lot of times there is a distributed model where authors are responsible providing the accessible content to you as the publisher is a person helping them to publish their content. Then you or someone else can provide resources to the author to learn on their own. But ultimately, it's up to the author to do the work and make it accessible or there's something in between.
I would like to hear how folks are handling this on their own campuses. If you want to put that in chat and/or save time during our questions and answers. Then accessibility checkers. I won't go too much into detail here. But there are options for accessibility checkers in Word. There are accessibility checkers for PDFs using the Adobe Acrobat accessibility checker.
There are some other web-based options. The WAVE tool is one of the most common ones that will check anything online with a URL. If you publish as an HTML or something like that. Then there are some browser extensions that you can use. I see in the chat there's one for Pressbooks. I'm going to include that in the future. Thank you for sharing that. A whole list of other ones for color contrast checkers versus if you are in Chrome or the WAVE tool will also do it. There are multiple options for color contrast, which aren't always included.
Here, they don't check everything. They don't always check color contrast. They don't check if headers are used, they don't check the reading order or the fact that you used jargon or acronyms.
Again, it's still a human element. While AI is a lot of these tools and checkers are built on AI, AI can really help with digital accessibility and I'm sure there will be new things in the future that we haven't even thought of. But the main takeaway is that a human is still needed to ensure accessibility. Please tell me if you have other AI-related tools or resources.
Lastly, self-care. You don't have to be perfect. Perfection is not the goal. It can't be since 100% accessible doesn't exist. But just try. We're trying to do the best we can, be kind to yourself, practice self-compassion. With that we do have more resources and training options that are included in the slides. You can always reach out to me. But what questions do you have? Was there anything else in the chat that I missed for questions or feel free to ask other questions too.
Heather: Thank you, Jacqueline, for that wonderful presentation. I didn't catch any more questions. I know that many of us have been sharing a lot of resources with each other and I think that's wonderful. If you can save the chat or copy and paste it into a document that might help you out.
We do have a Padlet activity. The Pub101 committee is going to revise the curriculum for OER authors. I'll share the link to our Padlet where we'd like you to share your thoughts about what you would like your OER authors to know about accessibility, formatting for accessibility, or the topic in general. If you haven't used Padlet before, go ahead and click on the link that's in the chat right now. It should open up a new browser window and look for today's topic, which is Session 2, Accessibility, April 17th, and click the plus sign next to the topic. It'll open up... Oh, thank you so much. I appreciate that.
It'll open up a sticky note where you can add your comments and then you would click the Publish button. Go ahead and give that a try. We'll just take a few minutes here to collect people's thoughts. Yes. The link to the slides and the recording will be in our orientation document. Let me give you a link again to our webpage that has that orientation document linked to.
Oops. I went directly to Karen. Let me send it to everybody here. There we go. Can everybody see that link tree? That's where the orientation document's at. Okay. Check. Oh, yeah. Somebody has a college accessibility resources department. Yep. Ours is not staffed heavily. I assume other people's aren't staffed very heavily either. It really does help for everybody to know about accessibility, how to format for accessibility, what to look for, how to use those checkers.
Yep. We can't be perfect. We will try our best together and learn from mistakes. Yep. Yeah. To think about accessibility first when you first start authoring. Yeah. Just some training and accessibility before you start is a wonderful thing to do. Yeah. Using accessibility checkers throughout creation, those are all excellent ideas and thank you for those.
If anybody has any more questions for Jacqueline, can you please post them in the chat? You can also raise your hand. I can call on you if you want to speak. Pretty quiet bunch. You guys know so much already, right? It was a good presentation. It was excellent. Thank you. Okay. D'Arcy. Yeah.
Jacqueline: There have been a lot of resources being posted. But if others have more resources or other tips for how it's worked for you, please put those in the chat as well. Where is the more detailed alt-text linking to? From my slides, if you were talking about that link, it goes to a lib guide that we have here at Montana State University Library, which is an instruction and accessibility best practices guide. There's a section for alt-text that then has multiple options for complex images, the general guidelines, et cetera.
D'Arcy Hutchings: I apologize. I don't think it was clear. What I mean is when we're writing the alt-text, you see more details at and that sort of thing. Where are we directing this to? I mean, assuming is this back matter in a book style, and what if it's not book style? I just was curious. Where are your recommendations for linking to, because a lot of this stuff doesn't already exist somewhere.
Jacqueline: Right. That could be in multiple places. Again, it depends. For example, on our lib guides, sometimes we have an infographic and underneath it will say, "See the alt-text." That clicks just to a separate lib guide page that is either included in the same lib guide and it just has another page that says, "Infographic alt-text."
Or I've also seen where people have just one big lib guide for all of their alt-text somewhere and then they link out to that. The short answer is you just have to decide where you're going to put it and what makes sense for your format, put it there and then get the link and link to it. If that is not an option because of the format, then just provide a longer alt-text in the context itself. Hopefully that answers your question.
D'Arcy Hutchings: Yes. Thank you.
Heather: Sorry. Kim Hale has a question too. She's asking about the cover in the back, if there are images too.
Jacqueline: If they are providing extra information, lots of times the alt-text could be for a cover image, could just be the title of the book and the authors just the text that is involved. If it's chemistry and there are some beakers on the front and you also want to tell them that there's a picture of beakers, then that's fine. But oftentimes the cover is decorative in a way that it isn't specifically conveying certain information. But if it is, then you can provide alt-texts for them as well.
Heather: Okay. I see applause coming in. Excellent presentation. We can certainly share the link to the YouTube presentation with our faculty authors also. Yeah. Okay. I'll be respectful of people's time, if there's no more questions. We just want to thank you again for joining us as we continue to learn about open textbook publishing.
We hope that as we continue to share available resources and recommendations, that one of your key takeaways is the sense that you're not alone in figuring out how to support open textbook authors. Next Wednesday we're going to have a presentation on inclusion and online publishing by Christina Trunnell. We hope you can join us next Wednesday. Thank you again, Jacqueline.
Jacqueline: Thank you, everyone.
Heather: Have a great rest of the day.
END OF VIDEO
Chat Transcript
00:17:43 Karen Lauritsen: Great to see you all here! So glad you could join us.
00:17:51 Roxanna Palmer: Reacted to "Great to see you all..." with ❤️
00:17:55 Robin Miller: Reacted to "Great to see you all..." with ❤️
00:18:14 Laurie Preston: Ashland, Va - azaleas
00:18:14 Heather Caprette: Heather from Cleveland, Ohio. Lots of daffodils blooming here.
00:18:15 Amanda Larson: We've got dandelions and wild violets at my house here in Columbus, Ohio.
00:18:18 Jeanne Pavy: New Orleans -- jasmine, lugustrum, magnolias, many others!
00:18:19 Larissa Garcia: Hello! Logging in from St. Charles, IL. Daffodils blooming here.
00:18:20 Barbara Anderson: Chicago lots of tulips downtown
00:18:20 Karen Lauritsen: I’m joining from the California Central Coast and the coral bells are blooming.
00:18:20 Lori Albrizio: Hi all. Broward College in Fort Lauderdale, FL. Everything is blooming here in FL!!
00:18:21 Jeanne Kambara: Newark, De. Don't know the names but lots of pink trees
00:18:21 Sara Davidson Squibb: Poppies, lavender, hot lips sage — pretty much everything!!
00:18:27 Beronica Avila: Beronica, Granville Ohio and Tulips!
00:18:27 Karen Lauritsen: Pink trees!
00:18:29 Emera Bridger Wilson: Marquette MI...crocuses are all that are blooming here!
00:18:32 Alyssa Archer: Hi, Alyssa from Radford, Virginia - redbuds.
00:18:32 Thomas Gillespie: Marquette, Michigan. Tulips are just starting to come pu out of the ground.
00:18:36 Abbey Childs: Hi from Richmond, VA. There are some spectacular irises right by campus
00:18:38 Jacqueline Frank: Hi everyone, I'm Jacqueline from Bozeman, MT with the tulips blooming
00:18:44 Robin Miller: New York City, NY - all our bulbs are up!
00:18:44 Kari Oanes: Moorhead, MN - not much blooming yet but we are getting some buds on the trees.
00:18:47 Karen Lauritsen: Lots of poppies here too.
00:18:49 Roxanna Palmer: Hello, Roxanna from Tampa, FL - it is already summer here 😎
00:18:51 D'Arcy Hutchings: Anchorage, Alaska. Still lots of snow on the ground!
00:18:53 Micah Gjeltema: Micah in Minneapolis. Saw some bluebells today (if those were bluebells)!
00:18:55 Joanna Lee: Leesburg, VA - dandelions!
00:18:55 Meredith Tummeti: Meredith - Centralia, Washington. Daffodils
00:18:56 Kelly Smith: Richmond, ky. Irises
00:18:57 Jessica McClean: Arlington Texas -- I saw some really pretty pink flowers on my way to work that I need to identify!
00:18:59 Kim Hale: Kim Hale, Chicago, IL
00:20:31 Heather Caprette: Pub 101 resources are located at https://linktr.ee/pub101
00:21:17 Roxanna Palmer: Reacted to "Pub 101 resources ar..." with ❤️
00:32:23 Amanda Larson: I'd be so blind without my contacts.
00:33:41 Karen Lauritsen: I love the auto door opener at the library for when my arms are full of books.
00:34:08 Heather Caprette: We had a chemistry professor author in Word in order to use the Equation Editor for accessibility to screen readers. He didn't know LaTex and didn't have time to do MathML in Pressbooks.
00:34:24 Meredith Tummeti: I love closed captions when I am working at the Regerence Desk.
00:34:33 Meredith Tummeti: *Reference
00:34:35 Karen Lauritsen: Reacted to "I love closed captio..." with 👍
00:34:35 Heather Caprette: Reacted to "*Reference" with ❤️
00:34:41 Heather Caprette: Reacted to "I love closed captio..." with ❤️
00:36:58 Karen Lauritsen: This is so key as we think about how to support projects and publishing programs…
00:37:35 Heather Caprette: The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative’s guides to designing and developing accessible content at https://www.w3.org/WAI/design-develop/
00:40:21 Heather Caprette: Bccampus’ Accessibility Toolkit - 2nd Edition at https://opentextbc.ca/accessibilitytoolkit/ - this is a Pressbook that can be cloned and remixed for an institution.
00:40:36 Heather Caprette: Microsoft’s free accessibility training for their products - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/accessibility-video-training-71572a1d-5656-4e01-8fce-53e35c3caaf4?ui=en-us&rs=en-us&ad=us
00:42:26 Heather Caprette: Colour Contrast Analyzer by TPGi - https://www.tpgi.com/color-contrast-checker/ http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ WebAIM’s Color Contrast Checker (http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/)
00:44:37 Heather Caprette: YouTube auto captioning - https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6373554?hl=en
00:45:09 Meredith Tummeti: You need to make sure you correct your auto captions in YouTube.
00:45:12 Heather Caprette: Editing captions in YouTube https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2734705?hl=en&ref_topic=7296214&sjid=2306914678158274410-NC
00:45:42 Meredith Tummeti: Reacted to "Editing captions in ..." with 👍
00:46:07 Heather Caprette: To caption other people's YouTube videos, you can use Amara.org. https://amara.org/
00:46:12 Karen Lauritsen: Speaking of transcripts, our transcript from last week’s Pub101 session is on our blog: https://open.umn.edu/oen/blog/pub-101-kick-off-2024
00:46:28 Heather Caprette: Reacted to "Speaking of transcri..." with 👍
00:47:05 Roxanna Palmer: Reacted to "Speaking of transcri..." with 👍
00:47:10 Roxanna Palmer: Reacted to "To caption other peo..." with 😎
00:47:34 Meredith Tummeti: Our college contracts with 3Play for professional captions, so you can just upload the caption file to your video.
00:47:53 Amanda Larson: Reacted to "Our college contract..." with 🥰
00:49:18 Heather Caprette: Reacted to "Our college contract..." with ❤️
00:49:27 Kim Hale: What about Times New Roman?
00:50:12 Kim Hale: I'm into Apto now...lol
00:52:11 Meredith Tummeti: When choosing fonts, I look to see if the similar looking letters and numbers are differentiated enough. 1, I, l and 0, O. Whichever font Zoom uses doesn't differentiate between lowercase L and capital I.
00:52:58 Debra Luken: Replying to "When choosing fonts,..."
That's a great idea! I never thought about that as a way to look at fonts. :)
00:53:11 Debra Luken: Reacted to "When choosing fonts,..." with 👍🏻
00:53:19 Jeanne Pavy: Reacted to "When choosing fonts,..." with 👍
00:55:23 Sara Davidson Squibb: I noticed in the Pub101 course that it mentions that the function of the image should be conveyed. I was wondering if that meant to articulate the intent e.g. humor?? However, that would involve interpretation or analysis … I think I need a better understanding of function.
00:58:05 Karen Lauritsen: Alt-text (totally optional) homework: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WvWQOcOKxNkRMUKNwVxSfoUrfxwjegih8saxZpS1QG4/edit?usp=sharing
00:58:12 Sara Davidson Squibb: Reacted to "I noticed in the Pub..." with 👍🏼
00:58:20 Heather Caprette: Reacted to "Alt-text (totally op..." with 👍
00:58:46 Jeanne Pavy: I made the error of using the reference "click here" --oops!
00:59:43 Amanda Larson: Replying to "I made the error of ..."
i still do it all the time and have correct myself. I always re-read an ask the question oh is that link meaningful? to catch when I do it.
01:00:32 Abbey Childs: I love the formula from this article for writing alt text for data visualization: https://medium.com/nightingale/writing-alt-text-for-data-visualization-2a218ef43f81 Alt text = 'chart type' of' 'type of data' where 'reason for including chart'
01:00:44 Sara Davidson Squibb: I like the use of these examples b/c it is one thing to know what you should do but it is less clear when you actually try to do it!!
01:01:01 Karen Lauritsen: Replying to "I like the use of th..."
Totally!
01:01:13 Karen Lauritsen: Reacted to "I love the formula f..." with 👍
01:01:41 Heather Caprette: Reacted to "I love the formula f..." with 👍
01:02:07 Jeanne Pavy: Reacted to "I love the formula f..." with 👍
01:03:42 Sara Davidson Squibb: So would it be totally against the rules to make the alt text longer to convey all those images?
01:05:08 Larissa Garcia: Is there a difference between alt text and image description?
01:07:00 Heather Caprette: Free Accessibility Checkers include: WAVE (Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool) - https://wave.webaim.org/ ANDI (Accessible Name & Description Inspector) - https://www.ssa.gov/accessibility/andi/help/install.html
01:08:23 Amanda Larson: If you're using websites or Pressbooks - I really like https://www.experte.com/accessibility
01:08:45 Heather Caprette: Tota11y for Chrome at https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tota11y-for-chrome/nkghaekndgmonifcpfgjmpfjlhnmflhp?pli=1
01:08:52 Amanda Larson: It's great - and tells you right where the issue is and is excellent at catching heading errors
01:09:16 Amanda Larson: they have a suite of other checkers too that are helpful when delivering content on the web
01:10:58 Karen Lauritsen: https://padlet.com/alarsonoer/pub101-z1d7xlq5amzizljf
01:11:18 Jacqueline Frank: Reacted to "It's great - and tel..." with 👍
01:11:25 Karen Lauritsen: What do you want your authors to know about accessibility and working with you to make resources accessible?
01:11:42 Maria Taylor: Will the link to the slides be included in the orientation doc?
01:12:03 Meredith Tummeti: Off to another meeting! Thank you so much!
01:12:12 Heather Caprette: https://linktr.ee/pub101
01:12:19 Debra Luken: Thank you! Great presentation!
01:12:23 Kim Hale: Reacted to "Thank you! Great pre..." with 👍🏾
01:13:00 Jacqueline Frank: Reacted to "Thank you! Great pre..." with 👍🏾
01:13:03 Kim Hale: I'm going to share this with our Accessibility folks as we are working on an OER now.
01:13:08 Amanda Larson: Also the padlet isn't going anywhere so you'll be able to come back to it to check out what everyone has shared after pub101 is over.
01:13:26 Karen Lauritsen: Reacted to "I'm going to share t..." with 💚
01:13:40 Lori Albrizio: Reacted to "I'm going to share t..." with 👍🏻
01:14:13 D'Arcy Hutchings: I may have missed... where is the more detailed alt-text linking TO?
01:14:33 Karen Lauritsen: The chat transcripts will also be posted to our blog.
01:15:03 Heather Caprette: See http://diagramcenter.org/making-images-accessible.html for alt text for complex images
01:15:47 Heather Caprette: https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/decision-tree/
01:16:00 Kim Hale: Cover and back if there are images too?
01:17:14 Kim Hale: Thanks
01:17:19 Karen Lauritsen: Thank you Jacqueline and Heather! And thank you to everyone for joining us. See you next week 🙂
01:17:23 Sara Davidson Squibb: Thanks Jacqueline 👏🏼
01:17:32 Maria Taylor: Reacted to "Thanks Jacqueline 👏..." with 👏
01:17:43 Robin Miller: Thank you!!
01:17:46 Jeanne Pavy: Thanks so much -- very helpful!
01:17:59 Barbara Anderson: Thank you!
01:17:59 Micah Gjeltema: Thanks Jacqueline, and thanks to everyone sharing links today!! I bookmarked a ton!
01:18:13 Jacqueline Frank: Reacted to "Thanks Jacqueline, a..." with 👍
01:18:28 D'Arcy Hutchings: Thank you!
01:18:29 Joanna Lee: Thank you!
01:18:31 Yasemin Onder: Thank you
00:17:51 Roxanna Palmer: Reacted to "Great to see you all..." with ❤️
00:17:55 Robin Miller: Reacted to "Great to see you all..." with ❤️
00:18:14 Laurie Preston: Ashland, Va - azaleas
00:18:14 Heather Caprette: Heather from Cleveland, Ohio. Lots of daffodils blooming here.
00:18:15 Amanda Larson: We've got dandelions and wild violets at my house here in Columbus, Ohio.
00:18:18 Jeanne Pavy: New Orleans -- jasmine, lugustrum, magnolias, many others!
00:18:19 Larissa Garcia: Hello! Logging in from St. Charles, IL. Daffodils blooming here.
00:18:20 Barbara Anderson: Chicago lots of tulips downtown
00:18:20 Karen Lauritsen: I’m joining from the California Central Coast and the coral bells are blooming.
00:18:20 Lori Albrizio: Hi all. Broward College in Fort Lauderdale, FL. Everything is blooming here in FL!!
00:18:21 Jeanne Kambara: Newark, De. Don't know the names but lots of pink trees
00:18:21 Sara Davidson Squibb: Poppies, lavender, hot lips sage — pretty much everything!!
00:18:27 Beronica Avila: Beronica, Granville Ohio and Tulips!
00:18:27 Karen Lauritsen: Pink trees!
00:18:29 Emera Bridger Wilson: Marquette MI...crocuses are all that are blooming here!
00:18:32 Alyssa Archer: Hi, Alyssa from Radford, Virginia - redbuds.
00:18:32 Thomas Gillespie: Marquette, Michigan. Tulips are just starting to come pu out of the ground.
00:18:36 Abbey Childs: Hi from Richmond, VA. There are some spectacular irises right by campus
00:18:38 Jacqueline Frank: Hi everyone, I'm Jacqueline from Bozeman, MT with the tulips blooming
00:18:44 Robin Miller: New York City, NY - all our bulbs are up!
00:18:44 Kari Oanes: Moorhead, MN - not much blooming yet but we are getting some buds on the trees.
00:18:47 Karen Lauritsen: Lots of poppies here too.
00:18:49 Roxanna Palmer: Hello, Roxanna from Tampa, FL - it is already summer here 😎
00:18:51 D'Arcy Hutchings: Anchorage, Alaska. Still lots of snow on the ground!
00:18:53 Micah Gjeltema: Micah in Minneapolis. Saw some bluebells today (if those were bluebells)!
00:18:55 Joanna Lee: Leesburg, VA - dandelions!
00:18:55 Meredith Tummeti: Meredith - Centralia, Washington. Daffodils
00:18:56 Kelly Smith: Richmond, ky. Irises
00:18:57 Jessica McClean: Arlington Texas -- I saw some really pretty pink flowers on my way to work that I need to identify!
00:18:59 Kim Hale: Kim Hale, Chicago, IL
00:20:31 Heather Caprette: Pub 101 resources are located at https://linktr.ee/pub101
00:21:17 Roxanna Palmer: Reacted to "Pub 101 resources ar..." with ❤️
00:32:23 Amanda Larson: I'd be so blind without my contacts.
00:33:41 Karen Lauritsen: I love the auto door opener at the library for when my arms are full of books.
00:34:08 Heather Caprette: We had a chemistry professor author in Word in order to use the Equation Editor for accessibility to screen readers. He didn't know LaTex and didn't have time to do MathML in Pressbooks.
00:34:24 Meredith Tummeti: I love closed captions when I am working at the Regerence Desk.
00:34:33 Meredith Tummeti: *Reference
00:34:35 Karen Lauritsen: Reacted to "I love closed captio..." with 👍
00:34:35 Heather Caprette: Reacted to "*Reference" with ❤️
00:34:41 Heather Caprette: Reacted to "I love closed captio..." with ❤️
00:36:58 Karen Lauritsen: This is so key as we think about how to support projects and publishing programs…
00:37:35 Heather Caprette: The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative’s guides to designing and developing accessible content at https://www.w3.org/WAI/design-develop/
00:40:21 Heather Caprette: Bccampus’ Accessibility Toolkit - 2nd Edition at https://opentextbc.ca/accessibilitytoolkit/ - this is a Pressbook that can be cloned and remixed for an institution.
00:40:36 Heather Caprette: Microsoft’s free accessibility training for their products - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/accessibility-video-training-71572a1d-5656-4e01-8fce-53e35c3caaf4?ui=en-us&rs=en-us&ad=us
00:42:26 Heather Caprette: Colour Contrast Analyzer by TPGi - https://www.tpgi.com/color-contrast-checker/ http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ WebAIM’s Color Contrast Checker (http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/)
00:44:37 Heather Caprette: YouTube auto captioning - https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6373554?hl=en
00:45:09 Meredith Tummeti: You need to make sure you correct your auto captions in YouTube.
00:45:12 Heather Caprette: Editing captions in YouTube https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2734705?hl=en&ref_topic=7296214&sjid=2306914678158274410-NC
00:45:42 Meredith Tummeti: Reacted to "Editing captions in ..." with 👍
00:46:07 Heather Caprette: To caption other people's YouTube videos, you can use Amara.org. https://amara.org/
00:46:12 Karen Lauritsen: Speaking of transcripts, our transcript from last week’s Pub101 session is on our blog: https://open.umn.edu/oen/blog/pub-101-kick-off-2024
00:46:28 Heather Caprette: Reacted to "Speaking of transcri..." with 👍
00:47:05 Roxanna Palmer: Reacted to "Speaking of transcri..." with 👍
00:47:10 Roxanna Palmer: Reacted to "To caption other peo..." with 😎
00:47:34 Meredith Tummeti: Our college contracts with 3Play for professional captions, so you can just upload the caption file to your video.
00:47:53 Amanda Larson: Reacted to "Our college contract..." with 🥰
00:49:18 Heather Caprette: Reacted to "Our college contract..." with ❤️
00:49:27 Kim Hale: What about Times New Roman?
00:50:12 Kim Hale: I'm into Apto now...lol
00:52:11 Meredith Tummeti: When choosing fonts, I look to see if the similar looking letters and numbers are differentiated enough. 1, I, l and 0, O. Whichever font Zoom uses doesn't differentiate between lowercase L and capital I.
00:52:58 Debra Luken: Replying to "When choosing fonts,..."
That's a great idea! I never thought about that as a way to look at fonts. :)
00:53:11 Debra Luken: Reacted to "When choosing fonts,..." with 👍🏻
00:53:19 Jeanne Pavy: Reacted to "When choosing fonts,..." with 👍
00:55:23 Sara Davidson Squibb: I noticed in the Pub101 course that it mentions that the function of the image should be conveyed. I was wondering if that meant to articulate the intent e.g. humor?? However, that would involve interpretation or analysis … I think I need a better understanding of function.
00:58:05 Karen Lauritsen: Alt-text (totally optional) homework: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WvWQOcOKxNkRMUKNwVxSfoUrfxwjegih8saxZpS1QG4/edit?usp=sharing
00:58:12 Sara Davidson Squibb: Reacted to "I noticed in the Pub..." with 👍🏼
00:58:20 Heather Caprette: Reacted to "Alt-text (totally op..." with 👍
00:58:46 Jeanne Pavy: I made the error of using the reference "click here" --oops!
00:59:43 Amanda Larson: Replying to "I made the error of ..."
i still do it all the time and have correct myself. I always re-read an ask the question oh is that link meaningful? to catch when I do it.
01:00:32 Abbey Childs: I love the formula from this article for writing alt text for data visualization: https://medium.com/nightingale/writing-alt-text-for-data-visualization-2a218ef43f81 Alt text = 'chart type' of' 'type of data' where 'reason for including chart'
01:00:44 Sara Davidson Squibb: I like the use of these examples b/c it is one thing to know what you should do but it is less clear when you actually try to do it!!
01:01:01 Karen Lauritsen: Replying to "I like the use of th..."
Totally!
01:01:13 Karen Lauritsen: Reacted to "I love the formula f..." with 👍
01:01:41 Heather Caprette: Reacted to "I love the formula f..." with 👍
01:02:07 Jeanne Pavy: Reacted to "I love the formula f..." with 👍
01:03:42 Sara Davidson Squibb: So would it be totally against the rules to make the alt text longer to convey all those images?
01:05:08 Larissa Garcia: Is there a difference between alt text and image description?
01:07:00 Heather Caprette: Free Accessibility Checkers include: WAVE (Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool) - https://wave.webaim.org/ ANDI (Accessible Name & Description Inspector) - https://www.ssa.gov/accessibility/andi/help/install.html
01:08:23 Amanda Larson: If you're using websites or Pressbooks - I really like https://www.experte.com/accessibility
01:08:45 Heather Caprette: Tota11y for Chrome at https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tota11y-for-chrome/nkghaekndgmonifcpfgjmpfjlhnmflhp?pli=1
01:08:52 Amanda Larson: It's great - and tells you right where the issue is and is excellent at catching heading errors
01:09:16 Amanda Larson: they have a suite of other checkers too that are helpful when delivering content on the web
01:10:58 Karen Lauritsen: https://padlet.com/alarsonoer/pub101-z1d7xlq5amzizljf
01:11:18 Jacqueline Frank: Reacted to "It's great - and tel..." with 👍
01:11:25 Karen Lauritsen: What do you want your authors to know about accessibility and working with you to make resources accessible?
01:11:42 Maria Taylor: Will the link to the slides be included in the orientation doc?
01:12:03 Meredith Tummeti: Off to another meeting! Thank you so much!
01:12:12 Heather Caprette: https://linktr.ee/pub101
01:12:19 Debra Luken: Thank you! Great presentation!
01:12:23 Kim Hale: Reacted to "Thank you! Great pre..." with 👍🏾
01:13:00 Jacqueline Frank: Reacted to "Thank you! Great pre..." with 👍🏾
01:13:03 Kim Hale: I'm going to share this with our Accessibility folks as we are working on an OER now.
01:13:08 Amanda Larson: Also the padlet isn't going anywhere so you'll be able to come back to it to check out what everyone has shared after pub101 is over.
01:13:26 Karen Lauritsen: Reacted to "I'm going to share t..." with 💚
01:13:40 Lori Albrizio: Reacted to "I'm going to share t..." with 👍🏻
01:14:13 D'Arcy Hutchings: I may have missed... where is the more detailed alt-text linking TO?
01:14:33 Karen Lauritsen: The chat transcripts will also be posted to our blog.
01:15:03 Heather Caprette: See http://diagramcenter.org/making-images-accessible.html for alt text for complex images
01:15:47 Heather Caprette: https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/decision-tree/
01:16:00 Kim Hale: Cover and back if there are images too?
01:17:14 Kim Hale: Thanks
01:17:19 Karen Lauritsen: Thank you Jacqueline and Heather! And thank you to everyone for joining us. See you next week 🙂
01:17:23 Sara Davidson Squibb: Thanks Jacqueline 👏🏼
01:17:32 Maria Taylor: Reacted to "Thanks Jacqueline 👏..." with 👏
01:17:43 Robin Miller: Thank you!!
01:17:46 Jeanne Pavy: Thanks so much -- very helpful!
01:17:59 Barbara Anderson: Thank you!
01:17:59 Micah Gjeltema: Thanks Jacqueline, and thanks to everyone sharing links today!! I bookmarked a ton!
01:18:13 Jacqueline Frank: Reacted to "Thanks Jacqueline, a..." with 👍
01:18:28 D'Arcy Hutchings: Thank you!
01:18:29 Joanna Lee: Thank you!
01:18:31 Yasemin Onder: Thank you
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