Full Advisory Commission on Accessible Instructional Materials in Postsecondary Education Update Session PowerPoint Presentation available here

Background on the Commission

The Advisory Commission on Accessible Instructional Materials in Postsecondary Education for Students with Disabilities was established under the Higher Education Opportunity Act and they held their first meeting on September 27, 2010.

The basic goal of the commission is to:

indentify ways to improve the opportunities for postsecondary students with print disabilities to access instructional materials in a comparable timeframe as the instructional materials for nondisabled students.

The commission is working to identify barriers and systemic issues as well as consider technical solutions. However, Gaeir acknowledged that whatever solutions exist today will likely not be the solution three years from now. As an example, the California Assembly Bill 422 passed in 1999 requires publishers to provide electronic text for students with disabilities for certain colleges and universities in ASCII format (no bold, italics or other formatting).

Six Areas the Commission is Considering

Accessible Formats With Comparable Timeframe and Costs

How students with print disabilities may obtain instructional materials in accessible formats within a comparable timeframe and at costs comparable to the costs of such materials for nondisabled students.

Feasibility of Standards

The feasibility and technical parameters of establishing standardized electronic file formats to be provided by publishers of instructional materials to producers of materials in accessible formats, institutions of higher education, and eligible students.

National Clearinghouse

The feasibility of establishing a national clearinghouse, repository, or file-sharing network for electronic files used in producing instructional materials in accessible formats, and a list of possible entitites qualified to adminiser such a clearinghouse, repository, or network.

Market-based Solutions

The feasibility of establishing market-based solutions involving collaborations among publishers of instructional materials, producers of materials in accessible formats, and institutions of higher education.

Universal Design

Solutions utilizing universal design.

Low Incident, High Cost Materials

Solutions for low-incidence, high-cost requests for instructional materials in accessible formats.

Four Task Forces

Gaeir was clear that they are still early in the process and the ideas express are simply a snapshot of their current thinking.

Task Force One

Led by Tuck Tinsley of the American Printing House for the Blind.

This task force is considering high-cost & low-incidence materials such as braille and tactile graphics as well as instructional materials in the areas of:

• science,
• technology,
• engineering,
• mathematics,
• foreign languages, and
• graduate studies.

They are also considering best practices, the definition of print disability (based on functional limitations) and the definition of instructional materials. Their report will include current data that shows that approximately 1% of all students have some type of print disability.

Task Force Two

Led by Jim Fructerman from Bookshare and Benetch.

This task force is looking at technology Issues, the possibility of a file repository, a standardized format and a federated search.

This group so far has recommended that it is not feasible to recommend a standardized file format. However, they are recommending a single repository and they do recommend a federated search to consolidate data and adding metadata to files pertaining to accessibility.

Task Force Three

Led by George Kerscher of the DAISY Consortium and the RFB&D

This task force is looking at market model solutions, E-pub and DAISY formats, Web solutions, Open Educational Resources (OER), Digital Rights Management (DRM) and Universal Design for Learning (UDL).

Considering the market model solutions, they are looking to find where market needs and the needs of users with disabilities overlap. Gaeir mentioned the example of text messaging that is replacing TTY services for many people.

Task Force Four

Led by Maria Pallante of the Copright Office

They are looking at the legal framework, copyright, the Chafee Amendment, the Americans with Disabilites Act and Section 504 of Rehabilitation Act, and State Higher Education E-text laws.

There are difficult issues to resolve in this area, but they are feeling that any rework of copyright will not pass the legislature. They are looking at how there can be an appropriate balance between copyright law and civil rights law. Because the exceptions under the Chaffee Amendment require that a learning disability be organic based, they are also working on providing guidelines that include current brain research on the organic basis of learning disabilities.

Wrap Up

Gaier is really excited about DAISY, but she mentioned that most students are still requesting Word or MP3 files in postsecondary settings because those are the formats that they are used to. She feels like this will change as the younger generation grows up using DAISY.

The commission is planning on having a rough draft of their report at the AHEAD Conference in July.

Anyone can receive public updates by sending an email to with the word ‘subscribe’ in the subject line.

Related Links

• Members of the Advisory Commission on Accessible Instructional Materials in Postsecondary Education for Students with Disabilities
• Information on the Commission from the National Center on Accessible Instructional Materials

Mike Cherim tackled the same subject awhile back on Avoiding Extreme Accessibility.

Bim Egan ran a whole series of articles titled Too much accessibility — TITLE attributes.

The two attributes that were on all three lists were tabindex and accesskeys. The lesson? Take the time to understand your users, then evaluate the work that you are doing to make sure it is actually helping those you are trying to help.

Guideline 1.3 Create content that can be presented in different ways (for example spoken aloud, simpler layout, etc.) without losing information or structure

Draft Guideline 1.3 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 discusses the importance of making information available in a form that can be perceived by the user– either directly or through an assistive technology. For example, if a site uses an image to convey meaning, then the alt text should be present so that it can be seen (in a text-only environment), heard (by a screen reader) or even felt (through a refreshable braille display). This pertains to both presentation and structure.

The technologies mentioned above– text-only browsers, screen readers and electronic braille– all do a good job at presenting information to the appropriate audience. However, what about users with cognitive disabilities? Text read aloud may be helpful in some situations, but what about a graphical representation of content? There are already some efforts in this area with the Communicate: Webwide symbol supported browser that claims to be able to represent over 29,000 words with symbols and while I applaud their efforts, with a Windows-only, proprietary, subscription-based product, I doubt there will be any widespread adoption in the near future.

Perhaps one day there will be an open system that will facilitate the collection and use of symbols in everyday tools. Until then, here are some other project/ideas that are exploring the use of symbols:

• Merriam-Webster Visual Dictionary
  Over 6,000 images organized hierarchically under 15 major themes
  
• Zlango Over 200 icons divided into 8 major categories developed for use on mobile devices. Read Romeo and Juliet in Zlango speak.
  
• sosymbol There isn’t a lot of information on this site, but they do have a collection of standardized icons and you can contribute your own using their online symbol creator after you have logged in.
  
• Iconfinder Icon search engine
• Symbol Signs from the AIGA 50 freely available passenger/pedestrian symbols.
• Symbols.com Simple symbols for a number of words.

I am neither deaf or hard or hearing, but the captions are almost always on when the television is on in our home. I enjoy the viewing experience and miss fewer words mumbled here and there when I can look down and glance at the words when needed.

Google video currently provides detailed instructions on adding captioning to videos. Additionally, in the Google Video Help Center, this questions is asked, “Do you generate captions/subtitles for my video?” and the answer they provide is a promising “Not at this time.” They also have a section where you can view examples of captioned videos.

NCAM Press Release

(hat tip: The Assistive Technology Blog)

For some reason, some folks get it into their heads that being blind is really terrible and the only way our lives can be whole is for us to have all the pretty pictures in the world described to us. Where, in actuality, most blind folks couldn’t care less about most of it.

Aaron then expounds:

…if there was a picture of a man using a particular product, I’m really not interested in hearing “picture of a man looking pleased as punch to be using the new ultra-lite USB hair drier,” or worse, “picture of a man.” I really don’t care about what image the designers chose to use as eye-candy. I can’t see them, and descriptions of meaningless images just waste my time and delay my getting to the information I’m really interested in.

Read the entire post for an apt comparison of web accessibility to bread making. Thanks Aaron, I’ll think twice the next time I feel an urge to wax poetic in my alt text.

Accessibility guidelines make clear that null alt text should be used for images that do not convey meaning, decorative images. Is the point at which an image goes from meaningful to meaningless unclear to anyone else?

Why do you care about accessibility?

1. Following the Crowd. My favorite A-list blogger keeps talking about accessibility and I don’t want to be left behind.
2. Curiosity Killed the Cat. Enough about alt tags already, what’s the big deal with accessibility?
3. Working for a Living. My boss cares and therefore so do I.
4. The Plaintiff will now Approach the Bench. The lawyer guy keeps telling me that I need to care about accessibility.
5. Me, Myself and I. I have a disability– I create accessible sites so that I can use them.
6. We are Family. I have a family member/friend with a disability.
7. We are the World. You know, “It’s true we’ll make a better day. Just you and me”.
8. Powerful Market Forces. Why on earth would I make my site harder for customers to use?
9. Pride cometh Before the Fall Of course my site is accessible, it also validates as XHTML Strict, I have never used a table in my life and I read W3C meeting minutes for fun.
10. I don’t. Oh, okay– fine. (there– that makes 10).

Any others you would add to the list?

As long as a web developer is motivated to create an accessible site, does it matter what their motivation is?

There is lots of commentary going on around the horn on this with a good set of links to some of the discussions from Eric Meyer, including a some suggested places to start from Joe Clark.

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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.

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.

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