 In this video, we'll be talking about how you can make sure that the materials you create are accessible for everyone. A lot of the time when we talk about free content online, like OER, we say that it's accessible because you can literally access it, but today's video is not about whether you can click through to read a news article or look at social media posts without logging in. No, this video is about digital accessibility, or the set of processes and practices you can use to make sure that anyone in your potential audience can fully engage with your work online. Making your work accessible helps every possible downstream user who might want to access it have a better chance of learning and benefiting from what you've created. This is especially important for open content because anyone in the world can technically access your work, but we want everyone to also be able to get the same value out of that material. Plus, making your work accessible helps those readers, listeners, and others to feel included and to know that their needs are being considered by peers like you who are creating and sharing content for free online. Remember, everyone benefits here. Creating educational podcasts with downloadable transcripts can be useful both for listeners who prefer to read along or take notes on what they're listening to and for those who are hard of hearing or deaf. And using headings in your text-based projects makes it easier for sighted users to skim through the sections you included and get an overview of your content, while also providing more context for those who need to use a screen reader to interpret the text you've shared online. So how do you make your projects accessible? The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines include a really useful set of principles for tracking digital accessibility. They say that content should be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust, which nicely translates down to the acronym POUR. Let's go through these together and talk about specific tips for how you can meet these principles in your own work. First, content should be perceivable, or users should be able to actually perceive the content in some way. For example, if a reader can't physically see the text on a page, that text should be presented in basic formatting that allows a screen reader to read off the text audibly. If there are a lot of images in the text, alternative text and captions should provide enough context for readers to understand everything presented within that image. For videos, you might provide captions for those who can't otherwise perceive the audible aspects of your video. And for podcasts or audio heavy video projects, you might also provide a transcript with headings and speaker tags so your audience can follow along with who is speaking and how the content of your podcast or video is organized. Next, content should be operable, or users should be able to navigate, interface with, and properly process your content. For text-based projects, this is usually handled through headings, which provide structure and outline to your text visually, while also serving as a machine-readable outline for screen readers. You don't want to just make text 24-point font and bold to make it look like a heading. You should also use the actual heading tools built into your word processor of choice to denote what the sections in your text are. For audio and video projects, this might mean you put in pauses so your audience has time to process and engage with your material. Or it could be as simple as using a tool to share your work that allows pausing, rewinding, and navigating through sections. Sort of like when you're listening to a YouTube video and you realize you lost track of where you are, so you hit the Go Back 5 Seconds button to rewind a bit. And then there are links. When you share links out to other places in a text document, you should use descriptive links or, in other words, the linked text should describe where the link goes. A Click Here link doesn't really help people understand what they're clicking on, and for folks who use screen readers, they have an option to read off all the links on a page. If all of the links say Click Here, that's even more confusing than it is helpful. Instead, have a descriptive link like, here is a link to our blog, or read up on the topic of accessible content. After operable, we have understandable content, or you should present information in a way that your users are able to understand. Sounds simple, right? This might have to do with the content itself or the interface it's presented within. The biggest point here for your OER projects I want to focus on is the content level. Who is your audience? What is their education level? And how can you make sure that the information you share is clear, understandable, and has a solid enough scope for your audience to understand what is being communicated? You don't have to make everything understandable to everyone. However, thinking about who your major audience is and what context they need in order to appreciate your work, that's pretty important. And finally, content should be robust, or various tools and assistive technology should be able to read your work. Remember how I mentioned using headings and descriptive links to help screen readers parse out what your documents say? That's part of this section as well. Make sure that the alternative text you provide for images in your document actually describe the purpose of the images it stands in for, and if the image is too large, be sure to provide a longer image description in the text surrounding it. For example, if you have an image that shows a process, like mitosis and action, you want to describe that process, the steps, and what it looks like in simple text as well, both to supplement the alternative text for the image and to help explain what's going on in the image in general. For headings, I already mentioned that you should use the heading tool built into your word processor to mark where headings are. But you also want to make sure that the headings follow a logical order. If I have a grocery list and the title grocery list is a heading 1, for example, the section for produce should be a heading 2, and the section for fruits should be a heading 3 under that. If I want to communicate that a heading is of the same level as another, like boxed goods in contrast to produce, I would set box goods to heading 2 as well. Robust is really the section for do what we said in other sections and do it well. So when you're thinking about making your content accessible in a way that's also robust, remember you can get help here. So now that we've gone over the four sections of poor, what can you do to make sure you're being accessible with your projects? Here are some general tips. First, start with an outline, a script, or another way of keeping yourself on task with your project. This can help you put together good section headings or otherwise just have a solid outline that your audience can follow along with. Second, keep in mind accessibility from the start of your project. Don't wait until the end to fix all your links and check that your headings follow each other logically. If you start out with the poor tips in mind, you'll save yourself a lot of work down the road. Next, make sure that you actually create captions or transcripts for any media projects. You might create these from your base script that I mentioned earlier, or you might need to draft them from scratch. But don't forget them. Autogenerated captions are not good enough, especially if your project is focusing on a scientific topic that uses subject-specific terms. And remember, you can always ask for help. There are great support people in your department, in your library, and elsewhere on your college campus that can support you with making sure your work is accessible from the start. So don't feel like you have to do this all alone. You don't. Thank you for watching. You can find additional readings and resources for creating accessible materials in the description below, including handouts, videos, and webpages I've compiled for you. This video, by Avi Elder, is available after a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Feel free to adapt or reuse it as you see fit, and best of luck creating your own accessible projects.