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