At OERcamp 2024, we took part in a session for the first time and without ever having attended a session ourselves. Our question for the hour was: What is the best way to make formulas accessible?
Our visitors to the session came from a wide variety of backgrounds. Some came from the natural sciences, others were already experts when it came to digital accessibility and still others brought a view from the arts and social issues. For many, the field of digital accessibility is currently a big issue, as it has to be implemented by law, but companies first need to learn how to do this. Another goal of the OER strategy is to make learning content openly accessible - including for people with disabilities.
As digital accessibility had been our main topic for some time and we had already created this session two months previously, our question was outdated and we already had an answer: it makes the most sense to create formulas that are to be made digitally accessible using Latex. If the platform or the editor does not allow this, the formula is inserted as an image and the Latex spelling of the formula is stored in the alternative text. As we have learned from two schools for the blind, blind and visually impaired people learn to understand and write the Latex code as pupils. This makes the text read aloud understandable for them with the help of a screen reader. If formulas are required to be entered in a task, the latex notation must also be considered as a correct answer option.
So we turned our session into a short introduction to digital accessibility and answered our session question. We then presented our project as a whole and began a round of introductions to the companies and projects present. This resulted in some new contacts and project ideas, such as the inclusion of art students in our best practice example for a more beautiful visualization of our teaching materials.