Total Reading Time
4 minutes
25 seconds

OEI Accessibility Statement

The Online Education Initiative is committed to making its electronic and information technologies accessible to individuals with disabilities by meeting or exceeding the requirements of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act (29 U.S.C. 794d), as amended in 1998. Section 508 is a federal law that requires agencies to provide individuals with disabilities equal access to electronic information and data comparable to those who do not have disabilities, unless an undue burden would be imposed on the agency. The Section 508 standards are the technical requirements and criteria that are used to measure conformance within this law.

While we make efforts to create an inclusive environment, some of the instructional material from OpenStax and other third-party linked instructional content may be inaccessible. It is advisable to vet all mandatory instructional material for accessibility before adding into your course.

OpenStax Accessibility Statement

OpenStax Accessibility Statement

OpenStax is also committed to ensuring that our websites and learning materials are as accessible as possible to the widest possible audience. Our goal is to ensure that all OpenStax websites and the web view versions of our learning materials follow accessible web design best practices, so that they will meet the W3C-WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 at Level AA and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. The WCAG 2.0 guidelines explain ways to make web content more accessible for people with disabilities and more user-friendly for everyone.

Our progress

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.

Feedback

You can help us to meet our accessibility goals by letting us know about your experience using OpenStax by emailing us at support@openstax.org or calling us 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:

A description of what happened.
Links to the web pages or the name of the web view material(s).
Links to the textbook and page(s).
PowerPoints
The name of your browser (e.g. Firefox 37, Safari 7, Chrome 42, etc.). If possible, please also provide the version number.
The name of your operating system (e.g. Windows 7, iOS 6, Android 4.4, etc.). If possible, please also provide the version number.
Any assistive technology that you are using (e.g. JAWS, VoiceOver, Dragon, etc.).

Interactive Simulations

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: support@openstax.org.

User-Contributed Content

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.