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 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.