Today, distance learning courses employ a wide array of electronic and information technologies. These include web pages, chat software, multimedia, and audio and video conferencing. To assure that the electronic and information resources used are accessible to all students and instructors associated with a course, administrators should address the following issues.
Postsecondary institutions nationwide routinely purchase information technology (IT) that is inaccessible to individuals with some types of disabilities. Most wait to consider accessibility issues until after a student or employee with a disability faces an access challenge, an approach that often results in significant time and expense trying to retrofit inaccessible products. Alternatively, some institutions are taking proactive steps at the procurement level to assure that purchased products are accessible to people with a variety of disabilities.
Michigan Virtual University (MVU) was established in 1998 by Michigan Governor John Engler and the Michigan Economic Development Corporation. It is a private, not-for-profit organization. MVU is a central access point through which academic and commercial organizations can offer online education and training.
A disability is defined as a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities, such as walking, seeing, hearing, speaking, breathing, learning, working, caring for oneself, and performing manual tasks. Examples of disabilities include AIDS, cancer, Cerebral Palsy, Diabetes, Epilepsy, head injuries, hearing impairments, learning disabilities, loss of limbs, Muscular Dystrophy, psychiatric disorders, speech impairments, spinal cord injuries, and blindness.
As people create websites or electronic documents, they should consider whether their use of color will prevent some users from accessing their content. Any information that is communicated using color should also be communicated using some means other than color. For example, if color is used to differentiate link text from other text on a page, users who are unable to perceive color differences will be unable to spot the links. A solution in this example would be to underline the link text or provide some other cue other than color alone.
One of the more challenging tasks facing web developers is creating accessible online forms, particularly forms that are accessible to screen reader users. This is partly because there are a variety of form control types—text, checkboxes, radio buttons, menus, and others—each with its own distinct accessibility challenges. It is also because different screen readers handle these form control types in different and somewhat unpredictable ways.
Videotapes, DVDs, and streaming videos on the web can be engaging instructional tools. However, the audio portions of these media are inaccessible to individuals with hearing impairments, and visual information that is not otherwise communicated through audio is inaccessible to individuals with visual impairments.
Multimedia can be an engaging instructional tool. Multimedia is increasingly delivered to students through CDs, DVDs, and streaming videos on the web. Multimedia, however, must be captioned and audio-described in order to avoid creating accessibility barriers for some individuals, including those with hearing impairments and those with blindness.
The audio content of multimedia presentations is inaccessible to people who are unable to hear. If there is content presented auditorially, the accessibility solution is captioning that provides a synchronized text alternative to the audio track. For additional general information about captioning, see How do I make multimedia accessible?
Multimedia presentations can be inaccessible to people who are unable to hear the audio content. The solution is to provide captions, a text version of the audio content that is synchronized with the multimedia presentation.
The technical standards and specifications for captioning video are well established and documented. For additional information relevant to online multimedia, consult the AccessIT Knowledge Base article What is the difference between SMIL and SAMI?