SERC Support for Creating Accessible Earth Education Resources

Poster Session Part of Friday Poster Session

Authors

Ashley Carlson, Carleton College
Maureen Kahn, Carleton College
Monica Bruckner, Carleton College
Sean Fox, Carleton College
mahdi mohamed, Carleton College
Carol Ormand Ph.D., Carleton College
A crucial component of equitable and inclusive courses is providing resources that meet the access needs of students and instructors. These needs vary widely and depend on ability/disability, assistive technologies (e.g. screen readers), and environmental situations (e.g. low bandwidth or loud working environments). The SERC (Science Education Resource Center) website hosts over 120 geoscience education projects and provides guidance on creating effective teaching materials. As part of the Compass project's goal to improve the discoverability of SERC-hosted materials, the project is improving accessibility of these materials. To this end, the project is developing new accessibility-focused guidance and is updating submission processes for resource contributors and content authors. These improvements are guided by user-centered design principles, the W3C WCAG2 (World Wide Web Consortium Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2), and the broad range of accessibility guidance developed by the geoscience education community. These changes to SERC tools and processes will improve the accessibility of SERC-hosted resources to educators and will support them in selecting and authoring resources that best meet the diverse needs of learners.