Accessibility in OER Fall 2022

Hi Joanna  - I took a note Monday about adding a Creative Commons license on materials to designate as openly licensed that hopefully aligns with this discussion post. Taking us back to district and school educators initially setting their resources up...

Does ISKME have an example of how/where a Creative Commons license would be added by users in a resource, if simply a statement or image on materials created by educators? We are wondering how to most accurately prompt creators to do so correctly.

Hi Mallorie -- This is a great question - I hope the group will chime in with how educators in their local context begin adding licensing to the work they create!

I will film a screenshare later today showing how Open Author (the tool on OER Commons) will populate the Creative Commons license into materials onto OER Commons. It's a great tool built into the Open Author programming.

Here is a link to the tool that Creative Commons (the organization) created to help you decide and create your license. They offer formats for website (Rich text, HTML or XMP) and they also offer formats for print work/media. https://chooser-beta.creativecommons.org

Looking forward to learning more and helping our staff begin to add licensing to resources they create. 

Hey Mallorie, The University of Baltimore uses Pressbooks.pub as its OER publication platform which has built in CC drop down menu that populates the metadata as well as every page in the text.  There is also a rich text box that allows you to link out to the CC license you obtain through creativecommons.org 

This is great! Thanks for sharing, Kristin. 

Hello hive-mind, in our District (Bellingham) we are struggling to identify a functional solution for remediating inaccessible text, as well as other common activities (like annotating with voice typing, or digital inking on touch screens) but I'll try to keep this simple to start.

Whether in print or digital, text which cannot be read aloud with universal tools (like Immersive Reader or Read Aloud in Microsoft programs) continues to be a common barrier. As you can probably guess from the above examples, we are a mostly "Microsoft / Windows district", and we are specifically seeking functional solutions for PCs which are used by most students as their 1:1 device.

Although this is a bit tangential to our primary aim of creating accessible, open materials, I'm hoping we can learn from this group and improve our knowedge!

Thanks in advance. 

Read on for additional context for those willing to engage on this topic ...

In other settings, I've used mobile apps (Lens, Claro PDF Pro, etc) and marginally satisfying desktop software (Read & Write Windows' PDF Scanner) as well as browser extensions, such as texthelp's newish Orbit Reader (which may be a progressive web app?). In my experience, the mobile device (iPad) camera is unmatched by the laptops; however, we don't have iPads at secondary levels. I know we could theoretically scan materials on those big multi function devices in the copy room at each school, then remediate these files with software, but the workflow continues to be a challenege... as you can imagine, it's not efficient or pratical in many cases. 

I really appreciated last's weeks emphasis on "functional accessibility", and I'm not giving up on seeking a solution. I know there must be a functional strategy to convert inaccessible text, have it read aloud in practical manner (ideally, while referencing the text in context*), annotate with voice typing or "digital ink", etc... any ideas?

*Side note on text to speech tools Read Aloud and Immersive Reader - a common concern I hear about Immersive Reader is that the user is removed from the source document and unable to reference context. This would lead teachers to promote Read Aloud, which doesn't create an "immersive" view, but this feature is not in OneNote - at least not OneNote Windows 10, which is our districts go-to verson for now... I want to continue workshopping these strategies so that I can recommend the most reliable, functional option for accessing universal text to speech tools.

To bring it back to our Academy, this issue has emerged from an inaccessible ebook which we have adopted. In order to obtain a "more accessible" version the publisher is requiring additional payment. Although it's a bigger discussion, I wonder what role OER could play here... I also wonder about modifications to our tech environment, e.g. should we be making OCR stations (iPad with Lens app in kiosks) in our libraries? 

Unfortunately, I am very new to accessibility and am learnig greatly from this series (and from the post above!) So intrigued about creating OCR stations as mentioned. What incredible hacks we can bring in to our libraries to benefit our students.