11.1: Introduction
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Learning outcomes
- Understand what accessibility means in an online environment, why it is important, and what standards and policies are in place to support it.
- Apply principles of universal design while creating your materials in order to provide online content to ALL students, to assess equally all students' skills, knowledge and attitudes, and to engage and motivate all students.
- Have deeper insight in various types of disabilities, their effect on how people use the Internet, and into assistive technologies that exist to accommodate these disabilities.Analyze how websites are designed, what tools are available for their creation, and how to write for users with disabilities.
- Explore different types of multimedia: their potentials and challenges when using them for online learning with students with disabilities.Apply a checklist to test your site for accessibility and use automated validators;
- Look ahead at some additional resources for learning about accessibility.
Most of the content in this chapter is based on the work performed at the University of British Columbia (UBC) as a part of the “Web Content Accessibility” project in the period September 2005 – August 2006.
Great efforts have been made to give every student equal access to high-quality learning, and to remove barriers for people with disabilities. However, most of these efforts are focused on the traditional, face-to-face classroom experience. Less attention is devoted to those taking courses fully online, and their ability or inability to cope with web-based interactive content. While standards and guidelines have been developed to support and assist with accessible web design, their primary focus has been on technical specifications, assistive technologies, or legal issues. Fewer studies have been conducted to investigate how that "accessible" content is perceived from a learner’s perspective, and how helpful it really is.
As distance learning adapts to new technology, instructors should be innovative in their relationship with students and in the methods for developing educational content, accommodating the diverse needs and learning styles which will be beneficial for all, regardless of their (dis)abilities.
At the beginning of this chapter you will find a brief description of the situation at post-secondary institutions, regarding adjustments of their online materials to students with disabilities, as well as legal and ethical framework for making modifications. You will find information about, and examples of, applying Universal Design for Learning principles to the online environment for the benefit of everyone. A description of various disabilities will follow, where we will focus on specific student needs. Next, you will learn about legal requirements and existing standards for creating web content. We will describe practical steps and procedures and explain them with respect to different elements of online material design, together with several ways for testing and assessing accessibility. At the end of the chapter you will find a list of additional resources for further exploration.
“If the basics of usable design are ignored all users can be disabled by the inappropriate use of technology”. (P. Jeffels, 2005).