February is Inclusive Design Month for BCcampus Open Education, so for every Tuesday in February, we will be hosting a webinar on a different topic relating to accessibility and Inclusive Design.

Post by Josie Gray, Coordinator of Collection Quality, Open Education

In open education, we constantly talk about access and inclusion. These values inspire and guide our work. We want everyone to be able to use the resources we create, and we want to use these resources to break down long-standing barriers to education.

But despite our best intentions, we sometimes fall short. We create a resource, put an open licence on it, and post it online and call it “freely accessible,” but that isn’t always enough to ensure universal access. Students are diverse, and what may work for one person may not work for another.

Accessibility is often overlooked when creating open educational resources (OER) – especially in British Columbia where there is not yet any provincial accessibility legislation. At BCcampus, we want to empower instructors creating OER to create inclusive, well-designed, and accessible content from the beginning, and not as a retrofit.

These webinars tackle both broad and specific topics on accessibility and inclusion in design. We will spend time talking about the hows and whys of inclusive design and accessibility. We will also get into the details of how to achieve accessibility and what that looks like in different contexts and to different people. These webinars will be useful for people new to accessibility and those who have been doing the work for a little while.

Information

These sessions are open to all, and you do not need to register to attend. Each webinar will consist of a 30-minute presentation with another 30 minutes open for discussion and questions.

To join the session on the day of, navigate to the event (linked below or listed in the BCcampus calendar) and click the link called “Meeting Room.” Sessions will open fifteen minutes before the webinar starts.

Technology

• Headset or speakers
• Webcam (Optional, if there are many attendees, we may ask that people turn off their webcams)
• Mic (Optional, there will be time for discussion and questions but participation is not required. People will also be able to participate in the chat.)

These webinars will be recorded and shared under a CC BY Licence.

Webinar Details

Inclusive Design with Jess Mitchell

February 5, 2019 10-11a.m. PST

For the first webinar, Jess Mitchell from the Inclusive Design Research Centre (IDRC) will join us to talk about Inclusive Design. She will touch upon ideas like inclusion, design, transformation, innovation, access, diversity, equity, atypical, perspective-shift, data (quantitative and qualitative), anecdote, change, social justice, precarious value, intersectional, mismatch, multi-modal, and revolutionary.

Creating Accessible Presentations with Josie Gray

February 12, 2019 10-11a.m. PST

In this webinar, we cover how to make your presentation materials accessible. This material will be most applicable to those who use PowerPoint, but the basic principles can be applied if you use different presentation software. We will talk about the technical aspects of setting up accessible slides, strategies to ensure all of the content on your slide is perceivable by people in the audience, and how making your slides available in multiple formats can increase the impact of your presentation.

Designing an Accessible Open Textbook in Pressbooks with Josie Gray

February 19, 2019 10-11a.m. PST

In this webinar, we cover the things you need to keep in mind when authoring textbooks in Pressbooks in order to ensure they are accessible in all formats. This webinar will highlight accessibility features of Pressbooks, describe accessibility statements and what to include in them, offer suggestions on how best to structure your book, demonstrate how to set up your book so it works for people using the print copy and digital copy, the importance of offering multiple formats, and other design choices that will improve the accessibility of your open textbook.

What Makes Something Inaccessible or Not? with Josie Gray

February 26, 2019 10-11a.m. PST

This webinar aims to highlight overlooked or unrealized accessibility barriers by giving concrete examples of what might make something inaccessible and how that barrier might present for different people. By connecting the ideas of the previous webinars, we offer a way to think more critically about digital and print accessibility, especially as it relates to open textbooks and open educational resources.