Accessibility for On-line Teaching and Learning

Accessibility is a term that is often used to describe the degree to which something is usable by as many people as possible without significant or burdening modification. Accessibility is often associated with assisting or benefiting people with disabilities. Current estimates based on U.S. Statistics suggest that approximately 20% of the U.S. population have some type of disability. Disability categories include:

Mobility
Deaf or Hard of Hearing
Visual (Blind or Low Vision)
Learning (including Attention Deficit/Hyperactive)
Speech and Language
Psychological
Other (Epilepsy, Head Injury, etc.)

The range within each category is also broad. For example, visual impairments include those legally blind, those who suffer from potentially blinding eye disease, and people who have visual conditions not correctable by glasses.

Disability Law

To address the concerns and issues of Americans with disabilities, Congress passed Section 508 of the 1998 Rehabilitation Act—prohibiting discrimination against people with disabilities and mandates actions that must be taken to facilitate equal opportunity. The most important provision of the act is Section 504, which states that:

"No otherwise qualified handicapped individual in the United States...shall, solely by reason of his handicap, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."

Simply stated, this means that all college programs and activities must be accessible to people with disabilities.

Accessibility as a focus, when expanded beyond benefiting people with disabilities, refers to the ability to access information by all. Within learning environments, it is about providing content to meet the needs of all learners—all learners benefit. In this broadened context, disability is reframed to reflect ‘diverse ability’ – which includes a mismatch between learning styles or learner needs and the instruction offered. When instructional material is designed to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design, we are referring to ‘universal design’ (UD) that benefits all learners, including those with disabilities.

Universal Design

UD is about making products and environments useful to people with a wide range of characteristics that include age, race/gender, language, socioeconomic status, and ability, disability and learning style. Principles of UD evolved from the field of architecture and are quickly being embraced in education. Architects recognized that many of the environmental changes needed to accommodate people with disabilities actually benefited everyone.

Multiple ways of representing information to learners
Multiple ways for learners to demonstrate knowledge
Multiple means of engaging learners

Why is accessibility important to faculty - especially to those who teach online?

Accessibility is a legal requirement but it is also about doing the right thing. It is about equitable use for all learners, convenient access on all devices and benefiting all users! Education delivered on line provides the opportunity to level the playing field for all learners. Accommodating all learners is part of the process of ensuring that high quality education experiences are available to every individual-reaching the widest possible audience. There is an ever-increasing demand for courses, resources and communication via the Internet. Access to the Internet is among the most important tools we have today. There are growing numbers of people accessing the web, working with e-mail and operating computers, PDA's (Personal Digital Assistant), cell phones, smart phones, iPod's and other mobile technologies.

Another trend that educators should be aware of is the rapid development in Assistive Technologies (AT), making it possible for individuals with a wide range of disabilities to gain access to computers, networking and telecommunications technologies and multi-media products. AT removes barriers to accessing information and education for people with disabilities. A potential learner may have differences in how they interact with a computer, including hardware and software, input and output. A person who is blind may use screen reader software to hear the information instead of viewing it on a screen. Limitations in mobility could mean that the student uses an adapted keyboard to navigate the Web. Common computer-related AT products include screen magnifiers, screen readers, large-key keyboards, alternative input devices such as touch screen displays, over-sized trackballs and joysticks, speech recognition programs, and text readers.

How can accessibility be used/implemented in online learning?

Improving accessibility begins with increased awareness of the barriers—the perceptive and functional abilities of people with mental, physical or learning disabilities that may or may not affect online learning. Examples of some of the barriers or problems for people with disabilities include:

Visual disabilities and images, charts, graphics, etc. without an alternative text behind them
Hearing disabilities and audio that doesn't have transcripts or captions
Physical disabilities and the ability to use a mouse or a keyboard
Cognitive disabilities, learning disabilities or dyslexia and web sites that lack clear language, are verbose, or have inconsistent navigation or design from page to page
Low vision and fonts that are not able to be enlarged, or have poor color contrast
Color blind and information that conveys meaning only through color (red/green)

As you design, consider each non-textual element: graphics, movies, graphs, charts, applets, and so on. Think of ways you could communicate the same information in text.

Consider all Web pages for your organization (i.e., pages associated with courses of instruction, departmental programs, Campus-sponsored activities, employment, administration and university services) – is the information and service(s) accessible to the widest possible audience - including users of old, adaptive, alternate, or emerging technologies?

What best practices, techniques, or guidelines are useful when considering accessibility?

At the design stage of courses, curriculum or resources, think about UD, and the inclusion of people with disabilities or people with different learning styles or technologies.

Content -- Give thought to what you are communicating. Make it clear.
Structure -- Thoughtful organization can assist access to content.
Presentation -- Thoughtless presentation techniques can block access.

Content is how users process information presented on the web is to scan as quickly as possible the content, scrolling down the page looking at items that stand out (headings, links, bold text and bullet points). Those using AT (visually impaired or non-keyboard users) often scan pages by tabbing between headings or links and listening for descriptive information. An example would be the title or heading of a new section or paragraph or the alt text associated with a button.

Structure is how a page is organized, usually with navigational menu items, headings, sub-headings, paragraphs, lists, and links. You can think of it in terms of the hierarchy of a simple MS Word document. The title of the document could be the topmost heading, i.e., Heading 1; sub-sections of the document could be Heading 2(s) and so forth. Not only will this provide a visual distinction between sections of your documents it will also provide non-visual markers for screen reader users. Additional benefits to use headings correctly and consistently in Web documents are better and more accurate Google hits!

Presentation is how words and images (content and structure) are presented to the end user. Be consistent. Predictable design and navigation greatly enhance accessibility.
Be clear. Describe content, techniques, why and how, rather than relying solely on visual information. All visitors will appreciate good organization and clean design.

By separating structure and presentation your web resources will be accessible to and ready for the future of the Internet: PDA’s, mobile phones, in-car browsers, etc. This is most often done though the use of Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) whenever possible. CSS is a web markup language that accompanies HTML and gives both developers and users more control over how pages are displayed. CSS allows web developers to separate the appearance of a page (CSS) from its structure and informational content (HTML). Because it is not known how users are accessing content (using a wide variety of devices and media) the presentation of a document should not be the same for everyone (but content and structure should be). People with disabilities benefit from this approach because they gain more control over how web pages are displayed or presented. For example, a user might have a visual disability that requires text to be displayed at 24 pts and in bold yellow on a dark blue background. If you are presenting your information using cascading style sheets that may have text set for 12 pt font, black text on a tan background, the end user can apply their own CSS. In effect, overriding your CSS with their own!

Put yourself in another person’s shoes. As you design, or review your material, imagine yourself in AT browsing situations. Will you still be able to access the content if you:

Are unable to use a mouse? - Turn your mouse over!
Have limited vision? - Set your monitor to grayscale or print out your material on a black and white printer!
Are unable to view images? - Turn graphics off!
Have a portable device or limited vision? - Increase font size!
Cannot hear or have limited hearing? - Turn your sound off!

The tools of web accessibility will change a lot in the future, but there are a few things you can do now. Most importantly, provide alternative text for graphics and provide good color contrast between type and backgrounds.

When creating web pages, select an authoring tool that both encourages you to create accessible content in a fairly intuitive and integrated fashion and helps you to check whether you have created accessible content. For example, when making Web pages, Macromedia Dreamweaver has built in preferences that help you to make your content more accessible and reminders and prompts for when you fail to make accessible.
Another example is using Adobe Acrobat to create more accessible PDFs. By default, PDFs will be images of the text and the structure, unless they are authored correctly. A person using a screen reader, auditory browser, or other assistive technology (AT) will not be able to access or extract the information on a PDF that is an image. You can use the Accessibility quick check feature that provides feedback and checks for errors. If you are including PDFs, it is recommended that an alternative HTML file also be included.

What tips or advice could you share about accessibility?

The Internet and online learning has unlimited potential to offer access to information using different modalities, assuring people with disabilities will be included. Many of the techniques used for accessibility benefit users of emerging technologies and new or different kinds of devices such a mobile phones, Personal Digital Assistants, information kiosks that are web-based, WebTVs and so forth. Then there's also people who are aging and wouldn't consider themselves to have a disability, but benefit from many of the same solutions.

Course Management Systems (CMS) e.g., Desire2Learn, also known as D2L, WebTV, Blackboard, A-Tutor, and WebCT etc., are designed to help educators create effective online learning. Components of these systems may include templates for content pages, quizzes, discussion forums, chat, and exercises such as multiple-choice, true/false and one-word-answer. Instructors fill in these templates and then release them for learners to use. A CMS is considered the shell, and even when the shell complies with accessibility regulations, chances are good that an instructor may add content that is not accessible.

Quite often this happens without the instructor even being aware that they are adding inaccessible content. For example, an instructor might upload PowerPoint without adding alt tags to images or without descriptive titles for their slides. Other examples could include audio files without text transcripts or video files without captions.

Education delivered via the Internet provides an opportunity to level the playing field for learners with disabilities through use of new technologies, in combination with thoughtful design of web and on line resources. The technology is available, but the onus now rests with designers to present Web-based resources in formats that are accessible to a full range of learners.

Guest Lecturers

Alice Anderson is the Technology Accessibility Program Coordinator at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Divison of Information Technology.

Blaire Bundy is a consultant for Learning Technology and Distance Education with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Information Technology.