CUDE

Learning management systems (LMS) such as Blackboard, Canvas, Desire2Learn, and Moodle allow instructors to provide online courses within the context of a consistent standard interface. One accessibility benefit of using an LMS is that many students with disabilities have the greatest success in accessing web content when it is presented using a consistent layout. If an educational institution standardizes on a particular LMS package, students at that institution will likely encounter the same online course interface for many of their classes throughout their academic career.

The first set of formal guidelines for identifying how to develop accessible web content was the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), developed through the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C's) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI™). WCAG 1.0 became an official W3C® Recommendation on May 5, 1999. The WCAG 1.0 lists fourteen guidelines and, additionally, provides a list of checkpoints for each guideline. There are a total of sixty-five checkpoints.

Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format developed by Adobe Systems. PDF makes it possible to distribute documents with original formatting intact. PDF files are created by scanning an original print document or by using a variety of popular software applications.

Describing the information conveyed within complex images such as graphs, charts, and diagrams can be challenging. Images must have text alternatives in order to be accessible to people who are unable to see the images, such as people who are blind and using screen reader software to read a document. Text alternatives are designed to describe the information or function the images are intended to convey. Fortunately, there are a few excellent resources that provide guidelines for describing complex images, supplemented with a variety of examples.

Educational content that is presented in audio is inaccessible to students who are deaf and to some who are hard of hearing. If the content consists of audio only, a printed transcript is an accessible alternative. However, if the content includes both audio and visual components, captioning is preferable because it allows the video and text equivalent to be synchronized, thereby giving a hearing-impaired participant access to content equivalent to that provided to a participant who can hear the audio.

A speech-to-text service is an accommodation that can be used by a student who is deaf or hard-of-hearing as a way to gain access to spoken or auditory content. With speech-to-text services, a provider listens to a speaker and then produces text for the person who is deaf or hard-of-hearing to read on a computer screen, TV monitor, or projection screen. Speech-to-text service is often called real-time captioning, and the providers are often referred to as captionists or transcribers.

Yes. The Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act of 2008 (ADAAA) specifically states that an impairment that is episodic or in remission meets the definition of "disability" if it would substantially limit a major life activity when active.

The Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) is the world's largest organization dedicated to the study of how humans interact with interactive technologies. In 2011, the SIGCHI Executive Committee began discussing ways to become more inclusive of researchers and practitioners with disabilities.

Some individuals with disabilities require assistive technology (AT) in order to access computers. Although Apple has been criticized for the accessibility shortcomings of its Mac OS operating system, it made significant progress in improving accessibility with the release of Mac OS X, and has taken it upon itself to develop and provide AT that supports and ships with its OS, without additional cost to the consumer.

XML is short for Extensible Markup Language and is a specification from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It is a meta-syntax, used to define new markup languages. XML's key benefits are its extensibility (XML-based languages can be extended with new custom tags) and its portability (XML-based languages can be used across different platforms and devices).