The PST utilized the WebAIM browser plugin (WAVE) to review each page of the ROTEL projects. This was not an original step in the publication process, but working with ISKME and discovering some accessibility issues, we added this as a standard part of the publication process.

Utilizing WAVE

WebAIM has made it their mission to focus on Web Accessibility. We opted to use their provided tool because of the convenience of their browser plugin and the standards of accessibility they provide.

Lessons Learned Using WAVE

Importing from Word: One of the biggest difficulties with importing from Word is the justified text. Text imported from a Word document appears to auto-justify itself. This goes against accessibility best practices.

Hidden Elements: An advantage of using a tool like this is discovering elements that got overlooked during the upload process. For example, empty headers – line breaks that are set to a heading level that contain no text.

Confirming Open Sources

An important aspect of the quality assurance step is to ensure that sources are open and available for us to utilize. This step was integrated while looking over texts that contain larger sections of texts.

Lessons Learned

Fair Use: Some sources are not open, but they are relevant or important to the subject matter in question. These sources shouldn’t be ignored or excluded outright. However, the rules surrounding Fair Use for Open Educational Resources have a certain level of interpretation involved in them. We opted to take a case-by-case basis on these instances, since this differentiation was determined during the final stages of editing for many of these texts. Setting parameters to work with for these circumstances is how we agreed this sort of question should be handled.