Open Education and Accessibility

The Open Edu­ca­tion Con­fer­ence is hap­pen­ing right now in Van­cou­ver, but is also offer­ing a num­ber of ways to par­tic­i­pate remotely, includ­ing live and archived streams of the event, or sim­ply fol­low the tag opened09 just about any­where (Twit­ter opened09, Flickr opened09, Deli­cious opened09, Blogsearch opened09, etc…)

The theme of this year’s con­fer­ence is “Cross­ing the Chasm” and while I was dis­ap­pointed that there weren’t more ses­sions address­ing dis­abil­ity acces­si­bil­ity directly, there is a tremen­dous amount of value in almost every ses­sion I have watched to any­one inter­ested in any kind of acces­si­bil­ity. Through the con­fer­ence web­site I was able to find a cou­ple of good resources on the acces­si­bil­ity of open edu­ca­tional resources for peo­ple with disabilities:

• Open Source Acces­si­bil­ity Meet­ing (Check out the draft doc­u­ments and presentations)
• The Open Course­ware Con­sor­tium Acces­si­bil­ity Work­ing Group

One of the resources I learned about today is folk­se­man­tic, a ser­vice and set of tools to help iden­tify open edu­ca­tional resources. A quick search for acces­si­bil­ity resources yielded the fol­low­ing share­able learn­ing resources:

• Acces­si­bil­ity of eLearning
• Acces­si­bil­ity in inter­ac­tion design
• Access E-Learning
• Acces­si­bil­ity in Dis­tance Education

If you do join in the con­ver­sa­tion, be sure to add your­self to the vir­tual attendee list!