If you’ve ever adapted an openly licensed textbook for one of your courses, chances are you’ve at least added or deleted a chapter to make it a better fit—but have you thought about what you could have done to make it a perfect fit? Whether you’re adapting an open textbook for a new purpose or using a tried and true resource you’ve taught for years, it’s important to edit your OER. Even if you don’t need to prepare an existing text for an audience it wasn’t originally intended for, there’s plenty you can do to make it more accessible, inclusive, and discoverable.

Proofreading your content for errors and readability is important, but the edits we’re talking about in this chapter are more substantial. They include things like creating accessible hyperlinks, diversifying your citations, and writing more descriptive chapter headings. All of this is important for making your book useful to the greatest number of readers.

Revise for accessibility

Accessibility should be a priority that’s addressed during the making of OER, but sometimes we have to edit existing content that doesn’t adequately meet accessibility standards. Your OER is a valuable resource, but readers won’t be able to learn from it if it’s inaccessible to them. You have to consider that you have a variety of readers with a variety of accessibility needs and respond accordingly. According to the CDC, over 60 million Americans reported living with a disability in 2020. That is not an insignificant number of readers! This is an incredibly important round of edits that will enable all readers to access your book:

• Review your book’s language and structure to ensure it’s accessible. This will help readers with cognitive disabilities find and understand information in your book, though it’s worth noting that all readers are likely to benefit. You should focus on using clear and concise language as well as organizing information in a logical order. The Center for Plain Language has a five-step checklist to guide you through the plain language process.
• Write good alt text for your images. To write good alt text, you need to determine what information each image conveys. That’s the information you need to capture in your alt text. If your image is purely decorative, alt text isn’t necessary. Alt text should be a maximum of 125 characters and shouldn’t include introductory words like “image of.” Keep in mind that images can be diagrams, charts, graphs, and maps—not just photographs, illustrations, and pictures. For details on how to write quality alt text, read Accessibility Toolkit’s chapter on images. There’s also a section that describes how to write long descriptions for complex images.
• Replace URLs with descriptive hyperlinks. Screen readers will read out each character of a URL, so it can’t be easily interpreted by users. Instead, descriptive hyperlinks should be used. Hyperlinks need to be descriptive so that users have context about where the link will take them. Imagine that a screen reader is reading out the links on a page and you hear things like “click here” and “read this.” You would have no idea where you’d end up if you clicked on those links. If what you heard instead were things like “click here to register for Friday’s event” and “read this to learn about open publishing practices,” then you’d be able to assess where those links might take you and whether you want to interact with them. Read Accessibility Toolkit’s chapter on links for more information on incorporating accessible links.
• Organize your content using proper headings. Headings allow screen readers to move quickly between sections in your text. Without proper headings, a learner who uses a screen reader will not be able to navigate your book. Also note that making text appear like a heading by bolding text and increasing font size is not sufficient. You need to use tags to identify headings in order for them to be recognized by screen readers. To learn how to do this with Pressbooks, read Accessibility Toolkit’s chapter on organizing content.
• Add transcripts, captions, and audio descriptions to accompany multimedia content. This is necessary to make your content accessible to all learners. For details on when and what you need to add to support different types of multimedia, Accessibility Toolkit has a chapter on how to include accessible multimedia content.
• Choose H5P activities that are accessible. Not all H5P activities can be made accessible, so you should be mindful of the interactive elements you include in your book. H5P.com is maintaining an overview of the accessibility of different H5P content types to help you evaluate how each activity meets the accessibility needs of your readers.

There is a lot of work to be done when it comes to making a book truly accessible, so this is only a starting point. To learn what else you can do to make your book accessible to all learners, read BCcampus’ Accessibility Toolkit.

Diversify your text

Representation is important. It allows people to locate their experience within your book, which helps them meaningfully engage with its content, and it can prevent you from presenting biased information that excludes relevant demographics. These edits will strengthen the overall quality of your content and improve how readers experience your book:

• Review your book’s language to ensure it’s bias-free. Making resources safe for everyone to access only makes sense. The American Psychological Association has a great resource for using language that is free of bias. There are sections on writing about disability, gender, racial and ethnic identity, and much more.
• Diversify the names, pronouns, and picture representations of people used to illustrate hypothetical situations in your book. Once you’ve ensured that everyone will be safe reading your text, the next step is to make everyone feel welcome. If your book exclusively references white men with anglicized names, it can give the impression that you created your book with only them in mind. By representing diverse groups of people throughout your book, you signal to readers that your content is meant for everybody.
• Diversify your citations, historical examples, and featured voices. If your book relies on a single viewpoint to explore topics that are pertinent to people from many different backgrounds, it’s likely that you’re excluding important information. Instead, you should discuss your book’s themes from multiple perspectives to ensure a balanced analysis. Your work will be stronger for it, and it will help a wider audience meaningfully connect with your material. Many demographics have and continue to face significant barriers to participating in research, so diverse sources might not always be available, but even acknowledging that can inform your writing and alter how you represent information. Cite Black Women is one excellent resource to help you reflect on your citation practices.
• Provide context for citations when needed. This should be done when an author doesn’t properly credit those who contributed to the work you’ve cited, or if an author held harmful views/took harmful actions that should be considered alongside their work. Telling the complete story of each source is a way to amplify the knowledge production of historically underrepresented voices and to recognize injustice and its ongoing effects. You can find a helpful example of providing context for citations in Rebus Community’s section on storywork for equitable OER.

If you’d like to read about making your book more inclusive in greater detail, we recommend OpenStax’s guidelines for improving representation and diversity in OER materials.

Localize your content

Whereas accessibility edits are necessary to ensure all readers can access your OER, localizing your book makes it possible for your intended readership to understand your content. These edits are especially important if you’re adapting an existing piece of OER for a new audience:

• Revise content so that it’s recognizable and meaningful to readers based on their geographical location. Surface-level edits can be made like replacing measurement systems or correcting spelling so that readers can easily interpret content (e.g., Fundamentals of Anatomy and Physiology is an Australian adaptation of an American textbook. The adaptation switched from American to Australian spelling and removed conversions to imperial measurements). More substantial edits can also be made like altering content to be more relevant to readers (e.g., Pulling Together: Manitoba Foundations Guide is an adaptation of a textbook originally created for the city of Vancouver. Pulling Together’s chapter on Urban Indigenous peoples was rewritten to be Manitoba-specific).
• Alter your text to match the reading level of its intended audience. You should keep an eye out for language, examples, and media featured in your book that doesn’t suit the reading level of your audience. This kind of edit might be important if you’re adapting a textbook designed for post-secondary education for a high school course or if the resource is not written in the first language of your readers.
• Make sure to define or replace any jargon. Perhaps you’re adapting a textbook for an interdisciplinary course or adding a chapter from a psychology textbook to your English resources. Discipline-specific terms and concepts need to be defined before delivering OER to an audience that differs from who it was originally intended for.

Amplify your book

After you’ve refined your book, you might be eager to have it reach a wider audience. This can be done by making it easier for search engines and humans alike to interpret what your book’s about. That way, search engines will be more likely to recommend your book to interested readers, and those readers will be more likely to read it if they can easily ascertain what it’s about. The following changes will encourage readers, adopters, and adapters to interact with your book:

• Make your book’s metadata as complete as possible. Imagine you’re looking for a book at the library. A book’s cover catches your attention, then you turn it over to read its summary before you decide whether or not you want to read it. If the back cover doesn’t provide you with any details on the book’s content, chances are you’d put it back on the shelf without further consideration. This is essentially what happens when your book is missing metadata. Search engines and humans might find your book, but they’ll struggle to determine its relevance and will likely dismiss it. That’s why including metadata is so important. It’s crucial to fill out your book’s subject field and write a detailed description for it. This will help search engines and humans find your book and determine how relevant it is. Read about how to fill out your metadata in Pressbooks.
• Create a descriptive book cover. In the situation described above, what catches your eye about a book is its cover. If a person is scrolling through an online repository of books, it’s likely that the first thing they look at for each entry is the book’s cover. After they take interest in a book’s cover, then they’ll take the next step and explore its metadata. Metadata is important for people to evaluate whether your book contains what they’re looking for, but the cover is the first point of interaction that draws them in. If your book doesn’t have a cover, there’s an increased possibility that people won’t take the time to find out what it’s about—instead, they’ll just keep scrolling. At the very least, your book cover should contain the book’s title. Quality illustrations and images are a nice bonus that can make your cover appear more professional, which makes people more likely to interact with it. Read about creating book covers in Pressbooks.
• Add links to other places in your book. This is called interlinking, which makes additional pathways for search engines to discover your content, meaning your book is more likely to appear in search results.
• Rewrite chapter titles/section headings to be descriptive. You may have come across recommendations that titles not exceed approximately 70 characters in length because they’ll be cut off in search engine results, but in actuality this won’t affect the order of search results. If you want to work on your book’s search engine optimization (SEO), what’s important is that your titles and headings are descriptive. Try your best to include interesting keywords that accurately describe what’s discussed in the chapter/section.

Read “SEO for open textbook creators” for more information on how to boost your book’s SEO.

Rinse and repeat

Guidelines for making online books accessible, diversifying your content, and more are always evolving, so it’s a good idea to review your book for necessary edits on a regular basis. One of the great boons of online textbooks is that changes can be easily made, so take advantage of that. Update your book frequently so that it remains a high-quality resource that’s accessible to everyone.