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Accessibility Workshop on OER for LaGuardia Community College: Create or Find Accessible OpenStax content

How to Find Accessible OpenStax Lumen content?

You need to know where and how to search

  • All content on the OpenStax page, accessed via the web address https://openstax.org/subjects are official OpenStax resources and are evaluated for accessibility.
  • If you access and search for OpenStax material on the OpenStax CNX page at the web address https://cnx.org/browse, then you need to search for accessible material.  The way you do that is by performing an advanced search at https://cnx.org/search and search for the author "OpenStax". That will pull up all content created and authored by OpenStax, which they evaluate for accessibility.
  • Community created content is not checked for accessibility.

About OpenStax Accessibility

OpenStax textbooks are openly licensed online textbooks available at no cost to students. Official OpenStax textbooks, those authored by OpenStax are reviewed for accessibility.

  • They ensure all their digital textbooks contain descriptive alt-text and table summaries and are designed to be easily navigable with assistive reading technologies.
  • The text in their books, including in headers, features, and exercises, is designed to be as reader-friendly as possible on-screen.
  • Math content is rendered in MathML, which is an accessible format that can be read with screen readers and styled with CSS. Though they render some complex mathematical graphics as images, all images are developed with detailed explanatory text.  
  • Additionally, some of their titles are available through Bookshare in BRF and/or DAISY formats to extend accessibility.
  • In some cases, OpenStax websites include third-party user-contributed content. In these cases, it is often not possible to ensure accessibility of the submitted content. However, their goal is to continuously improve the authoring tools provided by OpenStax for use by those third-parties, in order to increase the likelihood that accessible content will be produced.