Accessibility statement

We are committed to meeting and exceeding accessibility standards in our design and delivery of this textbook.

This textbook follows the accessibility guidelines found in the Accessibility Checklist for OER Development from eCampus Ontario, which was based on Conestoga Library Services’ Adapting or Creating OER accessibility checklist.

One major development is that interlinear glosses were built using novel code, which is available in the backmatter of this text. Ideally, the use of such code will raise the accessibility standards for interlinear glosses in other OERs and beyond. The new code gives the following advantages.

• Screen readers can read glosses as tables and thus allow more flexible navigation of them (i.e., users can view them in a grid format). It also means that users can quickly hop from gloss to gloss via navigating to the next or previous table more quickly.
• The glosses are formatted consistently in terms of visuals, mostly conforming to traditional glosses, allowing sighted users to read them more easily than if they were formatted using regular tables.
• Numbers are rewritten in transparent text for glosses with more than one sub-example. This means that screen readers will read the number again while sighted users will not be distracted by seeing the number repeated, even if using an external application that changes the background colour (i.e. for a dark mode interface).

Other standard accessibility practices undertaken include but are not limited to the following.

• High colour contrast.
• Screen reader navigability, as tested using NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA).
• Alt-text to describe images.
• The ability to use the OER in multiple forms, including PDF download as well as use on both computers and mobile devices.

In addition to formatting, we also used simple, approachable language and broke up the text into smaller passages.

There are also future opportunities to improve accessibility, including but again not limited to the following.

• Improve screen readers’ ability to accurately read non-English forms in interlinear glosses and within the text.
• Anything that users requiring improved accessibility tell us. We are open to feedback. See Contact the author for information on how to provide feedback.