Introduction

The idea for this Howdy to Everyone: A Guide to Creating Accessible Instructional Materials OER came out of a Spring 2024 series of seminars hosted by ISKME and CAST focusing on accessibility in OER in Institutions of Higher Education (IHEs).  Our Texas A&M team consisted of a librarian working within the English department, an instructor in the English department, an instructor focused on communication in Petroleum engineering, and a member of the disability resources office on campus. The first three all had various experiences with composing and editing OERs, and the latter had worked with accessibility both in the professional and educational spheres. Through discussion, we realized what our campus needed was a resource to help faculty and others produce accessible teaching materials.

Why a guidebook for Instructors? And why publish it as an OER?

We realized in conversation that although most faculty understood the need for accessible teaching materials, many on our campus didn’t have the knowledge or understanding of how to create or revise their teaching materials to meet accessibility standards or a clear understanding of what those standards were. In addition, the disability resources on campus were more student-oriented, worked with end-users much more than producers to ensure accessible materials, and had limited resources in some areas. Our output for the series, then, was determined to be an OER directed at instructors (and graduate student future instructors) including conceptual reasons and practical methods for ensuring various forms of accessibility in creating and using instructional materials.

We created this resource primarily for faculty and graduate students who continue to create, use, and renew instructional materials—whether syllabi, handouts, assignment sheets, schedules, lecture recordings, learning management system modules, or full OER textbooks—in their desire to provide students with the best education they can give.

Beyond Texas A&M University, we hope this text is a useful resource for all faculty who want to ensure and/or enhance the accessibility of their instructional materials. This guidebook’s instructions and information are meant to be introductory and non-technical. Please see links to more technical, “official,” or in-depth resources where appropriate.

Our Accessibility Guidebook — Foundations and Resources

To create this text, we have built on the work of the Cleveland State University Pressbooks-hosted Accessibility Toolkit for Authors of OER as well as principles and ideas from the seminar hosted by  ISKME and CAST.