Dear Community:
Apologies for cross-listing. I have a quandary that has been plaguing me the past month that I was hoping to get feedback from the community about.
As many (hopefully most/all) of you know, the new Dept of Justice accessibility guidelines are coming down the pike and set for next Spring. Briefly, these guidelines argue that academia should have all their active content set up to WCAG 2.1 accessibility standards with some added penalties if not. In the time of increased federal scrutiny over academic activities, this is not something that should be ignored. Judith Sebesta gave a nice webinar of this last month for OEG/CCCOER (New Accessibility Requirements for Web Content and Mobile Applications for Public Entities – CCCOER).
While this has implications for many different aspects of edtech (including anyone creating, distributing, and adoption OER), my immediate question is about H5P interactive assessments. While popular, the vast majority of h5p interactives are not up to WCAG 2.1. While some of the assessments can be with proper workarounds (see our accessibility guide for details - H5P Accessibility Guide | LibreStudio), most creators don’t create WCAG-compliant assessments. Furthermore, many H5P assessments cannot be made WCAG-compliant.
We cannot ignore this issue since campuses are NOT going to encourage or even all the adoption of OER with potential legal penalties from the DOJ. Given the ubiquity of H5P assessments in OER, what are people thinking about doing to address this issue?
These are ideas floating in my head:
- Excise all h5p assessments from OER to avoid the issue - use a different technology.
- Build a converter to convert the H5P assessments into better tech that can be made accessible with aria and other coding capabilities (e.g., QTI in LMS or other tech like our ADAPT homework system). This would take a bit of effort to do and if QTI is the protocol, then not all problems are possible to be converted since it has limited capabilities.
- Fork the H5P tech into something separate with control, but then operate outside of the H5P network for updating question types.
- Work with D2L, the new owner of H5P, to bring those questions that are possible to WCAG-compliance
- Build an alternative system in the H5P presentation system that provides students with an WCAG-compliant alternative (we do this with ADAPT). This would be painful to implement too.
There are benefits and detraction for each of the options above and none are simple and painless to implement. What is the community thinking about in regards to this specific question. I appreciate any/all feedback. We don’t have a lot of time to work around this requirement (Spring of '26).
Regards,
Delmar