Accessible Web-based Distance Education: Principles and Best Practices Article

Acces­si­ble Web-based Dis­tance Edu­ca­tion: Prin­ci­ples and Best Practices

I really like this arti­cle from Lau­rie Har­ri­son at the Unver­sity of Toronto because of the empha­sis on Uni­ver­sal Design Prin­ci­ples. While it is a bit dated (it looks like all of the ref­er­ences were pulled in July of 1999), the ideas expressed are solid and pro­vide a good basic overview for some­one new to the ideas of uni­ver­sally designed dis­tance education.

The idea of uni­ver­sal design is vital in pro­mot­ing the develp­ment of acces­si­ble dis­tance edu­ca­tion resources. Unfor­tu­nately, too many devel­op­ers still igno­rantly lump all types of users with dis­abil­i­ties together and then dis­miss their con­tent as being irrel­e­vant to “that pop­u­la­tion.” Idiots. When peo­ple real­ize that stan­dards based markup that sep­a­rates con­tent from pre­sen­ta­tion in acces­si­ble ways ben­e­fits EVERYONE then maybe we’ll see wide­spread change hap­pen­ing. The good news is that it is already hap­pen­ing to some degree and we’ll only see more of it in the next few years.

On a side­note, I’m get­ting my ton­sils out in a cou­ple of hours, so it may be a week or two before I post again. I’ll have plenty of time to think while recov­er­ing (and I’ll be on some pretty heavy painkillers), so maybe I’ll have some inter­est­ing thoughts to share when I come back.