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“Can I actually use it?” Testing open textbooks for accessibility

Amanda Coolidge and Tara Robertson
May 22, 2015

@acoolidge and @tararobertson

My name is Tara Robertson and I help run CAPER-BC, a small organization that provides alternate formats to 20 post secondary institutions across the province of BC. Basically we make custom audiobooks and ebooks for textbooks for students with print disabilities. Last year we served about 1200 students. We are funded directly by the Ministry of Advanced Education.

As we have existing relationships with Disability Service Offices and work with students with print disabilities it made sense that I recruit and communicate with the students.

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My name is Sue Doner. I am an instructional designer for online & blended learning programs at Camosun College in the province of British Columbia. I have been working on building faculty understanding & capacity re: Universal Design for many years. Before this Toolkit project, I had produced a number of how-to resources at Camosun (“Accessibility Checkpoints Guides”) that were designed to educate faculty about the why-of-the-what they needed to do while also not overwhelming them with information and technical detail. I was THRILLED to have an opportunity to work on the project we’re going to talk about today – take the conversation outside of one-on-one, institutional boundaries to the provincial level of exposure and community.

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BC Open Textbook Project

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Unless otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Feel free to use, modify or distribute any or all of this presentation with attribution.

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Why are we doing this project?

To increase access to higher education �by reducing student costs
To enable faculty more control over� their instructional resources
To move the open agenda forward in a meaningful, measurable way

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The goals of the BC Open textbook project are, first and foremost, to increase access to higher education by making higher education more affordable. Students pay an average of $1200 per year in textbook costs and for some students that can be a barrier to their education in a number of ways.

Our second goal is to give faculty more control and power over the learning resources they use in the classroom. Because open textbooks have a Creative Commons license that allows for the book to be modified, instructors can modify and tailor their textbook to fit their course instead of modifying their course to fit a publisher’s textbook.

Third, we want to make open and open education more widely known to educators, and an open textbook project is a very straightforward way to begin conversations with faculty around open education and open educational resources. Textbooks are a familiar tool in higher education, and it is fairly easy for most of the people in higher education to understand open education through open textbooks.

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Average student debt difficult to pay off, CBC, March 11, 2014

Student Debt in Canada, Canadian Federation of Students, Fall 2013

After three years of post-secondary schooling in Nova Scotia, Verge graduated in 2008 with about $25,000 of debt — just about the national average. More than five years later, she has only managed to pay back about $2,000.

For people like Verge, high debt loads are not only a financial stress but can delay the time it takes individuals or couples to reach certain milestones, such as having children, getting married or owning property…

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Course	Textbook	Bookstore	Amazon
CHEM 1105	Chemistry: The Central Science (lab manual)	$215.00	$214.20
MATH 1501	Basic Technical Mathematics with Calculus	$186.50	$140
MINE 1101	Laboratory Manual in Physical Geology	$118.95	$155
COMM 1135	Writing for Success	$45.95	$36.20
COMP 1620	New Perspectives on Computer Concepts	$183.95	$165.25
	New Perspectives on Microsoft Excel	$137.95	$151.40
MINE 1100	Mineral Exploration and Mining Essentials	$73.95	$89.95
MINE 1107	None	-	-
PHYS 1147	Custom book & Lab Manual	$37	n/a
SURV 1145	None	-	-
Total		$999.25	$952

2 Year Mining Exploration Program

Term 1 (of 4)

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Principal/Agent Problem

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“The cardinal lesson is that prices rise unchecked if the people who order the goods aren’t paying the prices.”

The $250 Econ 101 Textbook, Craig Richardson, Wall Street Journal, Jan. 13, 2015

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There are pedagogical implications to high textbook costs

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How students battled textbook publishers to a draw, Planet Money, NPR, Oct 9, 2014

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How students battled textbook publishers to a draw, Planet Money, NPR, Oct 9, 2014

What is going on here?

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65% students have not purchased a textbook for a course during their academic career because of price

Source: Fixing the Broken Textbook Market U.S. PIRG

Cover image: Center for Public Interest Research used under CC-BY 4.0 license

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Textbook Costs vs Student Success

Source: 2012 student survey by Florida Virtual Campus

Slide: CC-BY Cable Green, Creative Commons via http://www.project-kaleidoscope.org/

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60%+ do not purchase books at some point due to book cost

35% take fewer courses due to book cost

31% choose not to register for a course due to book cost

23% regularly go without textbooks due to book cost

14% have dropped a course due to book cost

10% have withdrawn from a course due to book cost

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Students Get Savvier about Textbook Buying,

The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 2013

Emma Anderson, 21

Political science, U. of California at Berkeley

“Usually when I don’t buy it, it’s because I’ve found that you actually don’t need it for the class.”

Jennifer Bi, 20

Economics, U. of California at Berkeley

“My most expensive class was clinical psych, because she writes the textbook herself, and it has a new edition every semester or something ridiculous. So it was like almost $200. And the thing is that you can’t use the previous edition, because she changes it herself because she knows the textbooks sell well. It’s like so manipulative.”

Marie Efira, 63

Anthropology, Foothill College

“I had to take very few classes, because each time the price of the book more than doubles the tuition fee. It took me much longer to get my degree.”

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“My textbook is…

…back-ordered

…in the mail

…out of stock

…the wrong edition

…on hold until my student loan arrives

…not needed until I decide I want this course”

How often do students start the term without the resources they need?

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Problems

Textbooks are expensive
Students are not using them
Students can’t keep them
Students can fall weeks behind
Students are taking more time to finish
Learning is negatively affected

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Open textbooks can help

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What are Open Textbooks?

A textbook licensed under an open copyright license, and made available online to be freely used by students, teachers and members of the public.

They are available for free as online and electronic versions, or as low-cost printed versions, should students opt for these.

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What are Open Textbooks?

A textbook licensed under an open copyright license, and made available online to be freely used by students, teachers and members of the public. They are available for free as online versions, and as low-cost printed versions, should students opt for these.

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Faculty have full legal rights to

customize & contextualize open

textbooks to fit their pedagogical needs

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The 5 R’s of Open

Make and own copies

Retain

Use in a wide range of ways

Reuse

Adapt, modify, and improve

Revise

Combine two or more

Remix

Share with others

Redistribute

Adapted (color change) from Open Education: A “Simple” Introduction by David Wiley released under CC-BY license

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Creative Commons logo by Creative Commons used under a CC-BY 3.0 License

CC license image from Copyright in Education & Internet in South African Law used under CC-BY 2.5 South Africa license

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The Project

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The Project

Don’t reinvent it by Andrea Hernandez released under CC-BY-NC-SA and based on Wheel by Pauline Mak released under CC-BY license

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Faculty Reviews ($250)

291/365 by thebarrowboy used under a CC-BY

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Reviews > Adaptations

My Adventures Adapting a Chemistry Textbook

291/365 by thebarrowboy used under a CC-BY

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New Creations

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Publish Many

Write Once

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Results

Year	Faculty	Sections	Students	Savings
2013	12	18	553	$55,300 - $84,560
2014	42	78	2630	$263,000 - $367,896
2015 �(Jan-April)	33	73	2224	$222,400 - $252,285

Total	87	169	5407	$540,700 - $713,921

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Outreach

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This year, we are continuing to work on creating and adapting open textbooks, as well as promoting their use to faculty across the province:

We’re working with our trades training body, the ITA (Industry Trade Association) to help with the development of the Skills and Trades Training open textbooks. �
BCcampus continues to work with Alberta and Saskatchewan on partnership opportunities, and has started a Faculty Fellows program with 3 faculty members from different institutions and disciplines to help act as our faculty ambassadors for the project. The faculty fellows are also conducting research on open textbooks with the OER Research Hub in the UK and we will have some research results on our project coming forth this summer. �
Finally, BCcampus has been working with CAPER-BC on accessibility to ensure that the resources we create are useable for all and that we fulfill our mandate of increasing access to higher education.

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User testing

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Timeline

Mid-November – contacted Disability Service departments to recruit students

December 19 –sent testing instructions to students
January 19—received feedback forms from students
January 27—in person focus group
February 27 –published Accessibility Toolkit

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Testing open textbooks

One chapter from each of the following:

English Literature
Introduction to Psychology
Introduction to Sociology
British Columbia in a Global Context
Introductory Chemistry

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Feedback form

For each chapter:

Content questions
Feedback on specific items – navigation, layout, text flow, tables, font, images, links
Overall feedback

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5 different subject areas that didn’t necessarily line up with what our student testers were studying.

We gave the following instructions: “We’re asking you to read one chapter from 5 different textbooks in the way that you normally would, using the software and hardware that you would normally use. We realize that some of these topics might be outside the area that you’re studying.

�For each chapter there are a few questions about the content that are intended to test the readability of the content not your intelligence, so don’t feel bad if you have a tough time answering the questions. For each chapter please fill out the feedback form and note any areas where the content was hard to understand. It is likely you will get some content that is not accessible or not very accessible.”

For each chapter we thought up some content related questions, like “What is the definition of Weber’s law, or what is the population of Sweden?” that we hoped would make the testing a bit more realistic and give some focus to reading various textbook chapters.

When we were putting together the feedback form we took a look at a bunch of UX surveys. We had difficulty describing the concept of “layout”. We forgot to include keyboard accessibility as a section.

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open.bccampus.ca

As facilitators we were a little nervous about doing the focus group. For all of us this was our first experience with user testing, focus groups and working with a group of students who were low vision or blind. BCcampus has a strong track record of organizing engaging events and they ordered tasty food, booked a room in a venue that has good transit access. I also ran our plans by a blind colleague who runs an Adaptive Technology organization to ensure we hadn’t missed key accessibility points.

5 students attended the focus group. While they all have visual impairments they all use different assistive technology including: VoiceOver on an iPad, VoiceOver on a Mac, JAWS on Windows laptop, ZoomText on a Windows laptop and Kurzweil on a Windows laptop. They were from 3 different universities and have different majors including: general arts, English, Computer Science, Business and an Occupational Therapist who is doing a PhD in interdisciplinary studies. 65% of the CAPER-BC students have learning disabilities and last year over 50% of the materials we produced were in trades, so I was a little disappointed that I was unable to recruit students with learning disabilities or who are in the trades.

We learned a lot from the students at the focus group. They were really well prepared and had a lot to say. We were really lucky to work with such an engaged group of students.

Before the focus group Amanda and Sue went through the written feedback and pulled out things that people identified as being problems or where one student said it was fine and another student said it wasn’t accessible to them.

Amanda did a great job of facilitating the day. She did a great job of not making assumptions about what students were experiencing or why it was problematic, instead asking them for more detail or to show us what wasn’t working. I work with alternate formats every day and would’ve made some assumptions about why something wasn’t working. By being naïve and curious Amanda was able to flesh out with the students what wasn’t working.

The students highlighted some against accessibility issues we hadn’t anticipated.

For example, in the chapter from the English book has some embedded YouTube videos that JAWS didn’t read.

We didn’t anticipate that when poetry was enlarged using ZoomText that it could be annoying to have to scroll horizontally to read the end of the line. This formatting issue clearly got in the way of being able to feel the flow of the poem. Reading the students feedback didn’t really make sense, but having her show us what the problem was did. The in person focus groups were really valuable.

We didn’t anticipate that the section quiz questions and answers in the Sociology chapter were going to be so confusing. There were about 10 multiple choice questions and the answers were at the very end of the chapter, after the endnotes. No one really knew they were there as they lacked a heading. Also, a “vertical line” or “vertical” was used as a delimiter between each question and when read by VoiceOver or JAWS. So it sounded like “1. A | 2. B | 3. C | 4. D” which is super confusing.

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Students said…

“Please continue to consult with the students who are using these books.”

“Thank you again – it is really a privilege to be a part of this. You all did an excellent job – the facilitation, the bits and pieces of logistics, the questions and feedback – great job to all of you!”

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Accessibility Toolkit

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Our Process

Summary of steps (December 2014 – February 2015)

Focus group (7 students, 5 open textbooks, 1 chapter from each)
Questionnaire (for each chapter)
Feedback event (chapter-by-chapter discussion with students)
Toolkit plan & framework: Who, Why*, What & How� *Accessibility (& Universal Design) vs. Accommodation
Toolkit delivery: Where – in Pressbooks (same tool used to deliver open textbooks)

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4. Toolkit Plan. Post-feedback event:, Amanda, Tara & I met to brainstorm the plan; discuss the audience, the scope, & approach to take.

“Who” is the audience?: �Toolkit to be designed with Faculty/content creators, instructional designers, ed. techs, in mind who “may not know what they don’t know” about making materials accessible. Typical faculty writer is not always familiar with the pro-active strategies of Universal Design as they apply to accessibility, and would more likely be accustomed to referring students who identify selves as having a disability to their institution’s Disability Resource Centre…�
“Why” do they need the Toolkit?: �Several motivators here – the root of all things...

We – i.e. all practitioners in the e-learning industry – need to collectively reflect & practice an increased understanding of the differences between “accommodation” and “accessibility” – and by that I mean, accessibility as a specialized lens of Universal Design for Learning. ��For those who might not be familiar with the distinction between accommodation and accessibility:�

Accommodating for students with a disability involves some form of individualized adaptation of a learning environment – creating an alternative option after course is underway for a student to access or complete a component of their learning experience. To be eligible for an accommodation at most institutions, students have to formally identify themselves as having a disability with institution’s Disability Resource Centre. Accommodations should be reserved to overcome specific barriers for individuals, determined on a case by case basis, and only for those barriers that cannot be addressed through instructional planning.�.
Following the student-centred principles of Universal Design for Learning, course materials are pro-actively designed to support different types of learning styles and learner preferences. For example, visual aids can be an effective way of explaining a concept to some learners, while providing a text version of the same concept may be the learning preference of others. Planning at the design/pre-delivery stage for multiple methods of accessing course concepts is one of the fundamentals of UDL.�
Similarly, Accessibility of digital materials reflects thoughtful, proactive attention to the design of learning materials so that they can be accessed from Day 1 by learners with a disability. I.e. the stuff that should not require an accommodation. So - making course materials Accessible is just a specialized focus of the UDL framework.�

The best part about working to build our collective literacy around accessibility of digital course materials (in this case, Open Textbooks) is that accessible design is better for all learners – not just those who formally register as having a disability. The student-centred focus of accessible design also benefits those students who aren’t registered with a Disability Resource Centre. E.g who:

are aging into a disability (e.g. aging eyes may need to see text in larger font, or need option to view in high contrast); or (e.g.)
Are international students for whom English is a 2^nd language (e.g. may benefit from having all video materials close-captioned and opportunity to improve English-comprehension.)

“What” should be included?: � We didn’t want to overwhelm with information; our goal was to provide users with manageable steps towards success; ease the panic of “I don’t know what I don’t know when you tell me that my material has to be accessible”…�Therefore – goal was to create digestible, user-friendly, plain-language, “just enough information” guides - “Best practices” sections for different types of textbook content (with added benefit of being transferable to typical online course materials, because broader application and uptake can only help to increase capacity!!)�
“How” to bring the value of this work (i.e. making your textbook accessible) to life: �I.e. this work has real benefits for REAL people. Therefore:

(As noted earlier) - Emphasis placed on principles of Universal Design for Learning – pro-active remediation of materials so they can be accessed by anyone from DAY ONE (without having to register for or request an accommodation);
Humanizing element / elevate the student-centredness of this practice – project team adopted & adapted user personas from “A Web for Everyone…”, incorporated additional personas based on CAPER user data + our students. Through the integration of these personas, help to bring a recognizable person into the mix for each of the Best Practices sections, and move content creators/developers/designers past the theory of accessibility to the real-life impacts of it.

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“Where”: Toolkit built & delivered in Pressbooks site: added benefit of building/developing Toolkit content using same tool that the open textbook developers used = modeling of the practices need to adopt and reflecting the “what do I need to do” part in the same environment.

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The Outcome

Introducing… the BC Open Textbook Accessibility Toolkit

http://opentextbc.ca/accessibilitytoolkit/

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Accessibility Toolkit

“Key Concepts”

Universal Design for Learning
User Personas

“Best Practices”

Organizing Content
Images
Tables
Weblinks
Multimedia
Formulas
Font size
Colour Contrast

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Accessibility Toolkit (continued)

“Best Practices” Chapters:

Introduction & context for each content type�“File types include..” and “Before you begin…”
Who are you doing this for?�Persona example(s) + “this work supports students who…”
What do you need to do? �Includes technical instructions, supporting examples (good & bad)

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We created a common framework for the “Best Practices” chapters too: (E.g. TABLES)

Introduction, “What is a ---?”, and “Before you begin” (Guiding principle for us: avoid making assumptions about the end-user’s technical knowledge; be as clear as possible).
Establish clear context plus can’t assume everyone knows what an image is, etc. AND in some cases – pause to consider why you are including this. (Value added or bright & shiny…?)

Who are you doing this for?
“You need to do this, and here are the people you’re doing it for…”; note that not all of the people listed would be students who would register themselves as having a disability w/ their institution’s Disability Resource Centre.
Includes bulleted list of typical type of user who benefits from this work PLUS 1-2 of our user personas to again bring the humanizing element home.

What do you need to do?
Practical applications of the “what you need to do” w/ examples to illustrate when possible;
Included “new ground” discussion for many in the post-secondary education industry. �E.g. Multi-media section & requiring transcripts even for 3^rd-party videos. This isn’t always in line with copyright practices so pits accessibility; Typical accommodation limits (e.g. one-off productions that cannot be stored and re-used, etc.) aren’t in line with Universal Design & pro-active provision of alternate formats.

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Next Steps

Includes:

Incorporating Toolkit into development process for all new Open Textbook creators
Corrections to existing textbooks
User feedback and contributions
More chapters, new iterations (e.g. French version…?)
TRADES!!
BC (and beyond!) “Community of Practice”… [contact doners@camosun.ca]

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More to come, etc:

(E.g.) More info for making Math & science equations accessible (!!!)
More languages (e.g. have offers to translate into French and a braille version)

“Community of Practice” –

This is an area of practice that will benefit hugely from the sharing of resources/experiences/approaches between colleagues and institutions. It’s a new “literacy” skill for many of us, but we need to get to that place in our collective practice where we would no more overlook pro-active attention to accessibility requirements than we would putting on our seatbelt in the car. (Reference from CSUN).

It would be wonderful to have a centralized community we could turn to, that was focused on this specialized application of UDL. (BCcampus = happy to support this, and we’re in early stages of planning this out; in the short-term, please contact Sue w/ expressions of interest: doners@camosun.ca)

Current state – typical & growing issues in e-learning vs. accessibility:

e-Textbooks vs. accessibility: we know that most textbook publishers haven’t come to the table re: accessibility of e-textbooks yet. Eg. Athabasca reported exponential increase of accommodation requests since they have begun to adopt e-texts from one publisher.
Rapid growth of online teaching & learning in the trades = specific area of focus for UDL.

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Thank you!

http://opentextbc.ca/accessibilitytoolkit/

@BCOpenText @BCcampus

@acoolidge @tararobertson