Open Textbook Accessibility Toolkit
This is a practical guide for creating web-based content, i.e. digital content that meets the accessibility standards articulated by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 requirements. This toolkit resource was designed to support authors who are creating open textbooks for BCcampus’s Open Textbook Project and need to know how to make their textbooks accessible – i.e. how to create textbooks that match WCAG 2.1 requirements.
(Some language in this Toolkit refers to specific features in Pressbooks – the platform used to deliver the open textbooks – but the accessibility guidance is transferable and applicable to all digital content.)
Accessibility Checkpoints for Digital Materials
These PDF-based tutorials provide recommendations and guidance on how to make common types of course content accessible (based on WCAG 2.1 requirements).
- Accessibility Checkpoints for WORD DOCUMENTS (PDF)
- Accessibility Checkpoints for IMAGES (PDF)
- Accessibility Checkpoints for AUDIO Materials (PDF)
- Accessibility Checkpoints for VIDEO Materials (PDF)
See also: Captioning for Teaching & Learning Video Resources (PDF)
Acting on Ally’s Accessibility Feedback
Since we officially launched Ally (BB Ally) in our D2L system at the beginning of June 2020, faculty have been learning more about the technical accessibility of the content they create and upload to course sites. The Ally tool provides feedback on each file, which includes identifying the components that don’t meet WCAG 2.1 requirements and are therefore not fully accessible.
Ally provides built-in guidance on how to fix many of the accessibility issues it identifies, while some issues do not yet have these built-in instructions. In this section you will find mini-tutorials to supplement the information that Ally provides for some of the most common issues it finds in our courses.
- Issue: “This PDF is scanned; 0% Accessible”
Tutorial: Creating PDFs that are Scanned for OCR [Optical Character Recognition] (PDF) - Issue: “This document does not have headings”
Tutorial: Adding Headings to a Document (PDF) - Issue: “This PDF does not have a title”
Tutorial: Adding a Title to PDFs (PDF) - Issue: “PDF contains images that are missing a description”
Tutorial: coming soon - Issue: “The document has contrast issues”
Tutorial: coming soon - Issue: “HTML file does not have a language set”
Tutorial: Adding Default Language for D2L Content Webpages (PDF)