IMS Guidelines for Developing Accessible Learning Applications

This set of guidelines is a collaboration between the IMS Global Learning Consortium and Project SALT at WGBH’s NCAM. The guidelines outline the responsibilities of everyone involved in the development and utilization of accessible online content, from creators of authoring environments to students.

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.

Should Online Course Design Meet Accessibility Standards? (Article)

Let’s start with this:

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