Online Courses, Links and the Like

I have run across a few links recently that I wanted to pass on. Some of these have been around for awhile, but just recently came on to my radar screen.

First, a cou­ple of sites with train­ing materials/curriculum for acces­si­ble web design:

• Advanced Train­ing Course Overview from James Allen, Rob Sartin and James Craig for the Acces­si­bil­ity Inter­net Rally. and
• The Cur­ricu­lum for Web Con­tent Acces­si­bil­ity Guide­lines 1.0 devel­oped by the W3C-WAI.

Then a cou­ple of links pages:

• AccessibleNet.org has a tremen­dous col­lec­tion of acces­si­bil­ity resources cat­e­go­rized nicely, each cat­e­gory with it’s own RSS Feed. Be sure to check out the Train­ing and eLearn­ing category.
• Also, a solid col­lec­tion of links to course­ware acces­si­bil­ity mate­ri­als from the Spe­cial Needs Oppor­tu­nity Win­dows Project.

George Siemens blog pointed me to this list of 2003 Web­sites for Learn­ing that I enjoyed. That page points to the Youth and Edu­ca­tion Sec­tion of the Vision­ary Design Awards for 2003 rec­og­niz­ing sites designed with acces­si­bil­ity for per­sons with a visual impair­ment in mind. This list has also been dis­cussed at length at accessifyforums.com.

Lastly, if you haven’t seen this yet, the W3C-WAI has a great doc­u­ment on the Busi­ness Ben­e­fits of Acces­si­bil­ity Web Design

Enjoy!

Moodle and Accessibility

You may already be famil­iar with Moo­dle, an open source, mod­u­lar­ized, social con­struc­tion­ist course man­age­ment sys­tem started by lead devel­oper Mar­tin Dougia­mas in 1999.

It looks like the cur­rent ver­sion (1.1.1) has some basic acces­si­bil­ity fea­tures built in, but their road map for the next year is the really good part. By ver­sion 2.0, planned for early 2004, they are work­ing towards xhtml tran­si­tional com­pli­ance. Right now they are plan­ning on using some basic tables, but they will be eas­ily replaced with CSS posi­tion­ing. Then, ver­sion 2.1 is expected to bring basic sup­port for SCORM packages.

Moo­dle is already a full-featured, very usable CMS with an active devel­op­ers com­mu­nity and it looks like the next few months are going to bring lots of excit­ing changes. If any of you are inter­ested in being a part of the con­ver­sa­tions that are hap­pen­ing there, you can visit their forums (click login as guest). The devel­op­ers appear to be very open to suggestions.

Accessible Course Management Systems

I’ve been try­ing to get my fin­ger on the pulse of what is hap­pen­ing with course man­age­ment sys­tems and have been some­what over­whelmed. The options out there span the spec­trums of open source vs. pro­pri­etary, instructor-centric vs. learner-centric and of course from almost com­pletely inac­ces­si­ble to claims to be acces­si­ble to all users. Right now I’m try­ing to sort through some of those claims to inter­pret what dif­fer­ent devel­op­ers mean by accessible.

Start­ing with what I would con­sider to be the major com­mer­cial play­ers, Black­board has an acces­si­bil­ity page that describes some of their efforts and they have been a part­ner with WebAIM for a few years. I was able to dig up what appeared to be a token acces­si­bil­ity page on the WebCT web­site. How­ever, I don’t cur­rently have access to either of those sys­tems to really take them for a test drive so I’d love to hear from any of you who have.

Regard­ing open source sys­tems, there is a great list at EdTech­Post from Scott Leslie. There are a num­ber of projects, pri­mar­ily devel­oped at uni­ver­si­ties and then made avail­able to the edu­ca­tional com­mu­nity. One promis­ing sys­tem from the Uni­ver­sity of Toronto is ATu­tor, “designed with acces­si­bil­ity in mind.” I’ve just set up and ver­sion 1.3 (which has adopted the IMS Con­tent Pack­ag­ing Instruc­tions) and will be play­ing with it over the next cou­ple of weeks– I’ll be sure to report what I find out.

If you’re look­ing for a good place to start in find­ing out what some of your options are, Edu­Tools is a great place to start. They have a num­ber of reviews (includ­ing a brief blurb on “Acces­si­bil­ity Com­pli­ance”) and allow you to com­pare the prod­ucts that you are inter­ested in, includ­ing a group of what they con­sider “Acces­si­bil­ity Con­form­ing Prod­ucts”.

Any of you have an expe­ri­ence with a CMS that has (or hasn’t) worked for your needs?

Accessibility, the Good News

The gen­eral aware­ness of online acces­si­bil­ity issues has come along way in the past decade– from the iso­lated protests of a small group of zealots to an almost essen­tial aspect of good web design. Why the change? It wasn’t the legal require­ments of ADA or Sec­tion 508, nor the wealth of resources on the topic spewed forth by a vari­ety of orga­ni­za­tions. No doubt these voices have been influ­en­tial, but acces­si­bil­ity is where it is today pri­mar­ily because of:

1. Evolv­ing stan­dards and tech­nolo­gies that require a return to the sep­a­ra­tion of con­tent from pre­sen­ta­tion and
2. An explo­sion of con­sumer devices with the same require­ments for infor­ma­tion access as many assis­tive technologies

While a few devel­op­ers were able to see the advan­tages to mak­ing their con­tent acces­si­ble to every­one early on, the major­ity will only to do so under finan­cial, tech­nol­ogy and peer pres­sure. Already, there are many lead­ers in the web design com­mu­nity who are cham­pi­oning the ben­e­fits of design­ing con­tent that is acces­si­ble to everyone.

Will these pres­sures even­tu­ally solve all access prob­lems? No, but they have us headed in the right direc­tion faster than ever before, and that is good news for accessibility.

IMS Guidelines for Developing Accessible Learning Applications

This set of guide­lines is a col­lab­o­ra­tion between the IMS Global Learn­ing Con­sor­tium and Project SALT at WGBH’s NCAM. The guide­lines out­line the respon­si­bil­i­ties of every­one involved in the devel­op­ment and uti­liza­tion of acces­si­ble online con­tent, from cre­ators of author­ing envi­ron­ments to students.

The white paper presents guide­lines for author­ing (using XML, CSS and SVG), mul­ti­me­dia and almost any tech­nol­ogy used in an online course (white­board, doc­u­ment repos­i­to­ries, dis­cus­sion board…). There is also a help­ful appen­dix with links to help­ful sites on legal issues in regards to acce­si­ble dis­tance edu­ca­tion for a num­ber of countries.

The Full Table of Con­tents is use­ful for nav­i­gat­ing to spe­cific parts of the document.

Should Online Course Design Meet Accessibility Standards? (Article)

Let’s start with this:

As con­sumers, we would not tol­er­ate a dif­fer­ent size and thick­ness CD for every record­ing label that required a phys­i­cally dif­fer­ent CD player to pay it, so why would we tol­er­ate the equiv­a­lent in our courseware?

This arti­cle on the acces­si­bil­ity of online learn­ing mate­ri­als writ­ten by Peter Paolucci for the Inter­na­tional Forum of Edu­ca­tional Tech­nol­ogy & Soci­ety makes a strong case for con­sumers to demand bet­ter adher­ence to open stan­dards. He states:

…vendor-created depen­dency on its own pro­pri­etary plat­form will inevitably inter­fere with insti­tu­tional and designer free­dom to migrate to other plat­forms that are more com­pli­ant or less expen­sive to adopt.

The con­flict between the inter­ests of ven­dors to use pro­pri­etary stan­dards ver­sus the adop­tion of open stan­dards has thus far been won by the ven­dors because the edu­ca­tional com­mu­nity has been a com­pla­cent con­sumer. The fact that the cur­rent state of affairs excludes learn­ers from inac­ces­si­ble con­tent baf­fles me– I’ve won­dered to myself, “Do peo­ple just not under­stand?!” I then real­ize they don’t. Hope­fully as peo­ple and insti­tu­tions bet­ter under­stand the issues we’ll start to see real changes happen.

This arti­cle was a dis­cus­sion starter for the IFETS list­serv, the dis­cus­sion is for­mally over, but you can read the archives here

Accessibility in Distance Education (ADE) website

If you haven’t come across this web­site yet, it’s a great place to start, Acces­si­bil­ity in Dis­tance Edu­ca­tion from the Uni­ver­sity of Mary­land Uni­ver­sity Col­lege.
From their homepage:

The Acces­si­bil­ity in Dis­tance Edu­ca­tion (ADE) Web site focuses on help­ing fac­ulty develop acces­si­ble online learn­ing mate­ri­als for peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties. It is divided into five major sec­tions, tar­get­ing com­mon acces­si­bil­ity questions.

The five major cat­e­gories that they men­tion are What is Acces­si­bil­ity, Legal Issues, Under­stand­ing Dis­abil­i­ties, How-To and Best Prac­tices.
While there are many great resources spe­cific to dis­tance edu­ca­tion here, much of the site addresses acces­si­bil­ity issues in general.

Introducing… Curb Cut

It took me awhile to decide if I really wanted to started a blog. In the past year I’ve seen many become com­pletely use­less and wanted to make sure I was ready to jump in with both feet. Two things helped me to decide: 1) this will help me to more sys­tem­at­i­cally review and archive resources that I come across and 2) as far as I know, there isn’t any­one else who has specif­i­cally tack­led acces­si­ble dis­tance edu­ca­tion in the blo­gos­phere. So if you’re here, hope­fully you can find some­thing useful.

Why Curb Cut Learn­ing? You have likely heard of the curb cut prin­ci­ple– the idea that while curb cuts were orig­i­nally intended for per­sons who use wheel­chairs they are also con­ve­nient for a num­ber of other side­walk uses such as strollers, bicy­cles, gro­cery carts, and lug­gage. While you can always go back and retro­fit your instruc­tion so that it is uni­ver­sally acces­si­ble, it is usu­ally eas­ier to do so from the get go.

Thanks for stop­ping by,
Christopher