5Make it accessible to everyone

A resource is accessible when people with disabilities can perceive it, understand it, navigate it and interact with it. The Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the consortium that develops web standards, points out that it covers visual, auditory, physical, cognitive, neurological and speech disabilities, and that it also benefits other people, such as those using a mobile phone, those with a slow connection or those with a temporary limitation.

In education it is not an optional improvement, since a resource that some students cannot use leaves those people out of the activity. The Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER) of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) places effective, equitable and inclusive access among its objectives, and in the European Union accessibility is a legal requirement for public sector websites, established by Directive 2016/2102.

Artificial intelligence (AI) makes it effortless to add entrance animations, custom cursors or particle backgrounds. The article «Mantener la “A” de abierto en los REA en tiempos de IA» (Keeping the “O” of open in OER in times of AI), from the National Centre for Curriculum Development in Non-Proprietary Systems (CEDEC), points out that these effects add no educational value, and that they increase the file size, slow down loading on slow connections and can interfere with screen readers and other assistive technologies.

It is advisable to do without what merely decorates, and to ask the AI to respect the device’s reduced motion preference when an animation does have a function.

There are four tests that require no tools or technical knowledge:

• With the keyboard only. Go through the material with the Tab key and activate the controls with the Enter key. All controls must be reachable, in a logical order, and it must be visible which one has the focus.
• With enlarged text. Zoom the page to double size from the browser. The content must still be readable without texts being cut off or overlapping.
• On a mobile phone. The material must fit the width of the screen, and the buttons must be pressable with a finger.
• Without relying on colour. A right or wrong answer must not be distinguishable only by colour. It must be accompanied by text or a symbol.

Much of this work can be entrusted to the AI. The minimum is to ask it from the start for the material to follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the international standard, which is organised into four principles: content must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. This is what the instructions file for the AI does.

The recommended step is also to ask it to check the result with an automated tool and fix what it detects. Coding agents can do this unaided, since they install the tool, run it and apply the fixes. The W3C warns, however, that no tool alone can determine whether a site meets accessibility standards, so manual tests are still necessary.

One example is the interactive guide «MCD y mcm», by Felip Sarroca, devoted to the greatest common divisor and the least common multiple, in Catalan. It passes the automated check without a single warning, has all its controls within keyboard reach, with visible focus, states its language and adapts to a mobile phone screen.