ABSTRACT
Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, there was an increased utilization of online course materials. Circumstances created by the pandemic increased the need for high quality online course content. These online course materials should comply with accessibility regulations and guidelines to provide an equal learning experience for all students. Although these guidelines describe broad requirements, specific standards for creating text descriptions of visual elements, both static and interactive, have yet to be created for mechanical engineering content. Research is lacking regarding accessibility of images and other visuals within online interactive mechanical engineering texts. Defining standards for how engineering visual elements like images and animations are textually described will provide a baseline to measure the effectiveness of visual elements for students who require assistive technology, such as screen readers. The goal of this paper is to define accessibility standards developed for textually describing images, figures, graphs, animations, and other visual elements for a series of online interactive mechanical engineering textbooks (zyVersions) that have been adapted from traditional print textbooks. The group of content authors working on these zyVersions have written text descriptions (alt text) for the visual interactive content (animations) that have been added to the traditional textbook and in many cases have added to the text descriptions for figures including images, equations, and graphs that already appeared in the print text. The standards that have been used by this team of content authors include: (1) Writing text that balances precision with conciseness;(2) Structuring alt text to first capture important information, then incrementally filling in finer details;(3) Well-defined procedures for describing certain types of visual elements, such as phase diagrams and phase transformation plots in materials science and engineering, T-s, h-s, and P-v diagrams in thermodynamics, output response plots in control systems, as well as other common visual elements in mechanical engineering courses;and (4) Writing text for animated visual elements that describe in detail all dynamic processes and movements in the animation. This paper describes our guidelines in detail, and presents examples from three different zyVersions used in mechanical engineering courses. These standards can be modified for use across various engineering disciplines and will enable authors of online content to provide higher quality material that meets accessibility standards. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022
ABSTRACT
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic changed the methods of course delivery for many universities to hybrid or online-only classes, engineering students did not tend to read the textbooks. Traditional print engineering textbooks are typically dense and filled with practical information, but it is often difficult to convey complex concepts using static figures. In order to give students a more beneficial experience, several professors began writing interactive online textbooks (zyBooks) from scratch for introductory computer science courses. These zyBooks included minimal text, with emphasis on conciseness balanced with preciseness. Rather than explaining through text, animations and learning questions were created. The purpose of these animations and learning questions was to allow the students to interact with the textbook instead of just reading static text. The company that these professors founded, zyBooks was purchased recently by Wiley, which made it possible to transform the existing print textbooks in the Wiley library, beginning with mechanical engineering textbooks, into the interactive online format instead of starting from scratch. For the first version of these new interactive textbooks (zyVersions), the text from the original print book remains mostly unchanged but interactivity was added in the form of animations and learning questions. The purpose of the animations was to clarify, add to, or replace the existing text, figures, or examples from the print textbook. These animations include dynamic figures, images, equations, and text instead of static visuals with which students cannot interact. The sets of learning questions were added not as a summative assessment, but to promote student learning as a formative assessment. Two of these zyVersions were adopted and used by approximately 1,200 students across 75 courses at over 50 different universities and colleges. Data was obtained on interactive participation activities to understand student usage, student struggle, and student earnestness. This data is in the form of several metrics: the percentage of first time wrong, the number of tries until correct, the time spent, the percentage of students that struggle, and the percentage of students that give up. Preliminary results show that students are engaging with animations and learning questions in the current interactive online engineering textbooks. Qualitative data was also obtained in the form of a student survey and feedback on the effectiveness of the interactive elements from students and professors. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022