Our role in ensuring accessibility
For accessibility to become embedded in our everyday thinking and world, we all need to realize the role we all can play in accessibility. We need to incorporate accessibility into workflows and considerations. Try to step back and think "is X accessible? is there a way I can make Y accessible?" Ensuring accessibility does not need to be part of a person's job description or a person's personal experience and life to become something all people can participate in.
This page covers why accessibility matters, web guidelines and descibes the four main pillars of accessibility.
There are four main guiding principles of accessibility upon which WCAG has been built. These four principles are known by the acronym POUR for perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. POUR is a way of approaching web accessibility by breaking it down into these four main aspects. Many of the technology challenges faced by disabled people/people with disabilities can be described using one of the POUR principles. Read to learn more about POUR.
Means the user can identify content and interface elements by means of the senses. For many users, this means perceiving a system primarily visually, while for others, perceivability may be a matter of sound or touch.
Means that a user can successfully use controls, buttons, navigation, and other interactive elements. For many users this means using assistive technology like voice recognition, keyboards, screen readers etc.
Users should be able to comprehend the content, and learn and remember how to use your OER site. Your OER should be consistent in its presentation and format, predictable in its design and usage patterns, and appropriate to the audience in its voice and tone.
Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of users, allowing them to choose the technology they use to interact with websites, online documents, multimedia, and other information formats. Users should be allowed to choose their own technologies to access OER content.
Read the actual WCAG POUR guides: Perceivable , Operable , Understandable and Robust .