Case Study 6.5: Rebus Foundation—Auditing in Community

Auditing can also occur in community as the Rebus Foundation shows. The Rebus Foundation offers opportunities for open textbook creators to find collaborators who may help with writing, editing, or reviewing. Through their Contributor Marketplace, Rebus allows open education supporters to find answers for challenges they may be confronting including concerns around accessibility.

Apurva Ashok, Project Lead at Rebus, noted several examples for how open textbook publishers have discovered accessibility solutions through community discussion and problem-solving. For instance, the team behind the Introduction to Philosophy series realized that embedded hyperlinks were not going to show up in PDF copies exported from Pressbooks. They used the Rebus forum to pose this question and soon received a CSS solution for displaying the full URL in the PDF. The following example shows how this solution looks in practice.

Ashok also recommended including local disability or access centers in reviews of OER. She noted the importance of working as a community to develop and follow best practices for accessibility and pointed to Rebus’ “Accessibility Assessment” as one product of this type of work.