Accessible Synchronous Communication

Does it exist? I sup­pose that depends on who you ask– many ven­dors are quick to tout the acces­si­bil­ity of their syn­chro­nous com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools, but in real­ity it seems that most have a ways to go. In the past cou­ple of weeks I have looked at the fol­low­ing tools:

Hori­zon­Live claims it is acces­si­ble to per­sons with dis­abil­i­ties and even has an acces­si­bil­ity page with an archived acces­si­ble pre­sen­ta­tion that you can try out and some acces­si­bil­ity tips for screen reader use. It looks like there are quite a few frames in the pre­sen­ta­tion win­dow, but there are short­cut keys set for most of them, although I’m sure they would take some get­ting used to. Also, this app is plat­form inde­pen­dent– avail­able on a Mac, PC or Unix sys­tem. I have taken part in a cou­ple of these pre­sen­ta­tions that I enjoyed.

I have heard some good things about Cen­tra, but from the get go I was out as a Mac user, it is PC only. Fur­ther, the only thing I could find about acces­si­bil­ity on their web­site was an obscure ref­er­ence in the descrip­tion of a white paper. I have put in a request for more infor­ma­tion on acces­si­bil­ity of their prod­uct, I’ll post their response as soon as it comes in.

iVo­cal­ize Inter­net Con­fer­ence is another option. It is used by EASI for their online work­shops. iVo­cal­ize gives no men­tion of acces­si­bil­ity on their web­site besides a list of short­cut keys. How­ever, Talk­ing Com­mu­ni­ties, which uses iVo­cal­ize, does men­tion its acces­si­bil­ity fea­tures- iVo­cal­ize is PC only as well.

Some other sys­tems that I haven’t had time to look at include Net­Meet­ing, WebEx, Inter­wise and I’m sure there are a host of oth­ers out there as well. Does any­one out there have expe­ri­ence with these or any oth­ers? If so, I’d love to hear from you, please leave a com­ment so oth­ers can see what you have to say as well.

Lastly, an brief arti­cle titled Online Learn­ing Man­age­ment Sys­tems: Acces­si­bil­ity of Tools for Syn­chro­nous Com­mu­ni­ca­tion for the 2003 CSUN con­fer­ence (cour­tesy of Online Learn­ing Update).

Distance Education Resources

I have devel­oped a few dis­tance edu­ca­tion resources for staff at the Insti­tute for Com­mu­nity Inclu­sion and thought that some of you might find them use­ful. Enjoy and please let me know if you have any feed­back. The resources include an overview of dis­tance edu­ca­tion, under­stand­ing list­servs as well as some exam­ples of streamed, cap­tioned videos.

In addi­tion, I am cur­rently eval­u­at­ing three course man­age­ment sys­tems– Moo­dle, ATu­tor and Prometheus (now owned by Black­board). I have setup a sam­ple course in each of the three sys­tems, if any­one is inter­ested in look­ing at the courses, let me know . I would also love to hear about the expe­ri­ences that any of you have had work­ing with any of these systems.

Access for EVERYONE

I’ve been think­ing about acces­si­bil­ity in lit­tle dif­fer­ent terms lately. More and more I’m embrac­ing a wider con­cept of acces­si­bil­ity and access that extends far beyond the dis­abil­ity com­mu­nity. It is the idea that wher­ever con­tent can eas­ily be made freely acces­si­bly to be used by the masses, it should be. Too often, the free exchange of infor­ma­tion is being sti­fled by copy­rights, password-protected direc­to­ries and con­tent dis­trib­u­tors. How­ever, there is a lot going on to cre­ate more open con­tent, with projects such as Cre­ative Com­mons and MIT Open­Course­Ware and thinkers such as Lawrence Lessig, Stephen Downes and David Wiley .

It seems that bat­tle lines are being drawn, one side being those who want more con­trol over how their con­tent is dis­trib­uted and used vs. those advo­cat­ing for grant­ing more access and usage rights for users. While the free con­tent move­ment has been some­what on the fringes, it is show­ing up more and more in main­stream media. Over the next few years there will be more and more dis­cus­sion around this topic as both sides seek to defend their posi­tion and con­vince (or con­strain) the gen­eral pub­lic to adopt one way of think­ing or the other.

Some learn­ers are faced with a dou­ble bar­rier. They may 1) be unable to access and use con­tent because of cost or copy­right and 2) there may still be acces­si­bil­ity issuess once those bar­ri­ers are over­come . Hope­fully in the con­tin­u­ing dia­logue on these issues soci­ety and our law­mak­ers can forge and accept new ideas about the way we think about con­tent in the 21st century.

Free Clinic: Design and Implementation of Web-Enabled Teaching Tools

The Equal Access to Soft­ware and Infor­ma­tion (EASI) web­site offers monthly train­ing in the form of online courses and clin­ics on var­i­ous aspects of acces­si­ble infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy. This month they are offer­ring a free a free clinic titled Design and Imple­men­ta­tion of Web-Enabled Teach­ing Tools. The clinic will be offered on Feb­ru­ary 26th and Mary Hricko will be the pre­sen­ter. Mary has writ­ten a book with the same title as her pre­sen­ta­tion that addresses acces­si­bil­ity in dis­tance edu­ca­tion. You can sign up for the clinic online, hope to see some of you there!

I have not yet taken any of their courses, so buyer beware, but they also have some inter­est­ing tuition-based clin­ics and courses com­ing up. Barrier-free E-learning begins today taught by Pro­fes­sor Norm Coombs and a clinic on How to Max­i­mize Acces­si­bil­ity While Using Syn­chro­nous Video and Audio Instruc­tion from some folks at WebAIM. I’d love to hear from any of you who have taken one of these courses.

Lastly, they also have archives of some of their past pre­sen­ta­tions avail­able, enjoy!