Links: OZeWAI 2001 home page | presentations

Accessibility of educational course management systems

Liddy Nevile, Sunrise Research

The (perceived?) Problem

• Courseware manages materials and collaboration and students achievements
• Institutions like control, conformity, ...
• Colleagues say that they need assistance
• managing assessment and attendance;
• students want control of learning pace and paths; and
• Everything is easier with good courseware.

The Standards

Mostly we look to web content accessibility standards but

we are concerned with (intervening) tools to handle content that may transform content so

we need to look at both wcag and authoring tools standards (see the W3C ATAG) but

In general,

We don’t have strong, well-understood, let-alone appropriated theories; principles; access to ways to decide...

The Players - for any educational context

The administration staff - policies (eg user agents)

The technical support staff - system admins, cgi scripts

The subject leader - general conditions (look and feel)

The teachers (best practice??)

The students (access awareness)

The Educational Institution

• Policies are important, and,
• to some extent determinant but
• educational staff are (very resistant?)well,
• they do not like to be controlled by others, especially needlessly.
• So good professional development is essential.
• The practices won’t change unless the culture changes
• Local research
• Local solutions (templates)
• Strong, clear philosophical position
• Policies are determinant
• US vs Australian legal position
• Facilitate testing (test suites?)
• Provide definitive success criteria

The hardware / operating system

The hardware/operating system can be more or less accommodating of access supporting devices and applications

The balance between hardware/OS specificity and accessibility

The Browser

The choice of browser is more than a choice of access device:

• Ensure it is not a determinant of accessibility

Recommend a range of access devices, esp. those that are standards compliant

The courseware suppliers

• Responsibility to:
• Be accessible for course developers/managers
• Take advantage of hardware and operating system support for accessibility
• Provide external support for administrators, authors and users eg training, materials on site ...
• Prompt and prohibit authors
• Explain requirements and support authors
• Provide code validation and testing assistance
• Provide accessibility maintenance support

* Note the standards with which the software is compliant!!!

The Educator

• Working with
• Legacy resources
• Inaccessible digital resources
• Creating new resources

What objects will be included in the course?

Reference materials

• linked materials, esp. non-digital

Multi-media materials

• are they able to deprecate gracefully?
• how are they stored and used

Interactive materials

• how does interaction happen?
• Is it accessible?

Collaboration tools

• Asynchronous tools
• Synchronous tools

‘Learning objects’

* Note the qualities of the authoring tools and if necessary recommend appropriate tools to use with the courseware

The Student

• Do the students know that help is available?
• Do they know they need it?
• Can they get it without telling anyone they are using it?
• Issues with privacy, equity, benefit to all - flexible learning.
• The Open University (UK) approach
• A metadata/PICS type solution?

Solution providers approach

Standards developers

• W3C
• IMS
• NCAM, ATRC, ...

Courseware providers

• BlackBoard
• WebCT
• Macromedia
• Etc.

And content developers …

• Macromedia
• Microsoft

Melbourne University approach ...

• Pro-actively working on how to make the most of what you’ve got ….
• Legally appropriate
• Economically wise (retrofitting costs too much)
• Professional development
• Can we please work together more closely!
• Shared/collaborative research
• http://www.WebContentAccessibility.org/

Links: OZeWAI 2001 home page | presentations