Accessibility Workshop on OER for Hostos

General Information

Lumen Course Catalog Content

• Content located in the Lumen Course Catalog and classified as "recommended" and "highly recommended" is reviewed for accessibility by Lumen.
• If you are want to add to or change content you've adopted from their "recommended" and "highly recommended" courses, you will need to make sure the content you add is accessible, Lumen will not check the content you create for accessibility.

Community Developed OER Course Content

• Content created by community developed OER courses, which are hosted on Lumen, are not necessarily accessible.
• These include:
  • Boundless OER Course Archive
  • Achieving the Dream OER Degree Initiative Catalog
  • Community Course Catalog
• If you use content from any of these OER, you will need to check the content for accessibility issues.

Adding Accessible Content Instructions

Lumen Learning provides instructions "Guidelines: Authoring Accessible Content" on how to add accessible original content. 

I've highlighted a few sections:

• HTML
• Text
• Images
• Video
• Headings
• Lists
• Links
• Tables

Lumen Learning Accessibility Drawbacks:

Even though Lumen reviews their courses for accessibility, that does not mean all accessibility issues have been fixed. Several items which Lumen considers "supplementary materials" and "not strictly necessary for course completion or foundational to the learning experience" have accessibility issues:

• Some simulations do not contain text alternatives.
• Waymaker courses have a very small number of video only materials that do not have audio captions.
• No alternatives for time-based media or audio descriptions of the prerecorded video content inside Waymaker courses. Videos are however captioned.
• Audio descriptions are not provided for video content. Lumen still needs to assess which videos require audio descriptions.

-- Lumen Learning VPAT, October 2017