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?