Accessibility Basics
Accessibility Basics in
Pressbooks
Making content accessible means making it understandable for a wide variety of people, including those with disabilities or neurodivergent characteristics, as well as second language learners.
Accessibility and Accommodation
Accessibility resource centres commonly facilitate student accommodations by ensuring access to:
- Portable electronic and large-type textbooks for people with mobility limitations or low vision.
- Read-aloud files for text-to-speech software for people with learning disabilities, traumatic brain injuries, or others who may benefit from listening to an audio text.
- Tagged texts, images, and tables are used to enable screen-reader navigation for people who are blind or have low vision. Tactile graphics and braille are also helpful.
- Offering multiple formats of your open textbook is one key way to ensure greater access to it, noting that the EPUB format is often considered the most accessible for screen-reading software.
Overarching ways to improve the accessibility of your open textbook:
- Include the EPUB format among download options
- Ensure that digital text is machine-readable.
- Tag navigation elements, especially headings and subheadings, such as H1, H2, H3, etc.
- Describe images using alt text
- Tag tables with HTML markup, such as to indicate the header and data cells
Additional Resources
- BC Open Textbook Accessibility Toolkit: Provides an overview of basic concepts, starting with Universal Design, and continues with basics in best practices for organizing content, images, and more.
- DAISY Consortium’s Guidance and Training: Standards to support publishing practices for the benefit of increasing access for individuals with print disabilities. Their Pipeline Download is a cross-platform, open-source framework for converting text documents into accessible formats for people with print disabilities.
- National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS): Standard developed in the United States to assist with the production of accessible content in higher education. The NIMAS standard is based on the DAISY standard.
- Section 508 of the Workforce Rehabilitation Act: Requires federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology (EIT) accessible to people with disabilities.
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Overview from W3C: Aims to provide a single shared standard for web content accessibility that meets the needs of individuals, organizations, and governments internationally.
- International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF): Maintenance agency for EPUB.
If you have questions about open textbook accessibility, contact your accessibility resource centre. Resources at Concordia University include the Access Centre for Students with Disability and the Accessibility Hub.
This section is adapted from Accessibility: Authoring Open Textbooks by BC Campus and Modifying an Open Textbook: What You Need To Know by the Open Textbook Network (CC BY 4.0).
