Accessibility
Accessibility
At OpenStax, we're committed to ensuring that our websites and learning materials are as accessible as possible to the widest possible audience. As part of our commitment, we've chosen to work with a trusted third-party solution provider, Level Access. Learn more about our partnership with Level Access here.
We are working to ensure our websites and online services are accessible to all individuals and are committed to following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA. We are also firmly dedicated to complying with accessibility laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Section 508 and other applicable regulations. To support these efforts, we have partnered with Level Access, a leading digital accessibility solutions provider, to leverage their 25 years of experience and enterprise-grade platform. Our digital properties are regularly evaluated using a combination of automated testing and manual reviews by a diverse team of accessibility professionals, including individuals with disabilities. Through this partnership, OpenStax is building a sustainable accessibility program, enabling our teams to design, develop, and test for accessibility throughout the product lifecycle.
The text in our books, including the 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 we render some complex mathematical graphics as images, all images are developed with detailed explanatory text.
Additionally, some of our titles are available through Bookshare in BRF and/or DAISY formats to extend accessibility.
We're working hard to achieve our goal of Level AA accessibility, but we realize there are some areas that still need improving. Our developers are actively working to resolve issues that may hinder accessibility according to the guidelines we mentioned, including the way we handle parsing, error identification, focus order, use of color, and sensory characteristics.
We have an active partnership with Level Access, a leading third-party accessibility expert, to identify and remediate accessibility issues in our online textbooks and products. Level Access conducts rigorous audits of our online textbooks to help us identify areas for improvement, broken down by the severity of the issue and the WCAG criteria it relates to. Our activities to remediate accessibility issues include:
This process is ongoing and continuous. Each year, Level Access updates our VPAT to author an Accessibility Conformance Report that reflects the status of our products and services at that time. However, remediation work continues year-round (and thus our ACR may not reflect more recent remediation efforts that have taken place since it’s last update).
If you would like more information about OpenStax’s accessibility efforts, encounter any accessibility barriers on our websites, or require support in accessing our content, please contact us via email at accessibility@openstax.org or phone at (713)-348-5012.
If you've encountered an accessibility problem with one of our websites or the web view version of one of our learning materials, please provide the following information:
Some learning materials include links to interactive simulations (e.g. PhET physics simulations developed by the University of Colorado). While simulations are more difficult to make accessible than more conventional static textbook content, an effort to improve the accessibility of many PhET simulations is underway. As with any OpenStax feature, your feedback about the accessibility of the PhET simulations is welcome at: accessibility@openstax.org.
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, our 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.
The Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR / completed VPAT) for OpenStax textbooks is available here, and you can access the Conformance and Remediation Form for our textbooks here. Please reach out to accessibility@openstax.org if you are looking for Assignable's ACR or have any other questions. Visit our Accessibility Hub for answers to frequently asked questions.