Web Accessibility

The challenge of web accessibility raises issues of both policy and technology. Join experts in each of these two areas in this free April 4 EDUCAUSE Live! web seminar, The Why and How of Web Accessibility, as presenters Harry Hochheiser, Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Sciences, Towson University, and Tracy Mitrano, Director of IT Policy and Computer Policy and Law Program, Cornell University, discuss this important topic.

Policy guru Tracy Mitrano says: "Developing a web accessibility policy has been one of the greatest but most rewarding challenges I have faced in creating an IT policy framework at Cornell. With the EDUCAUSE Live! audience, I would like to share some of the struggles and stories about that process and what accessibility, education, and the web have come to mean to me as a result."

The newly formed IT Accessibility constituent group will help the EDUCAUSE community assess the scope of issues of universal IT accessibility, identify resources and initiatives, develop best practices on policy and assistive program and service development, and focus on how to approach campus-wide universal access of information by engaging in dialog across boundaries within and beyond the campus environment.

View the full list of EDUCAUSE constituent groups and related EDUCAUSE resources on Web Accessibility.

A message from ATHEN President Ron Stewart:

It is my pleasure to announce that the second issue of the ATHEN E-Journal is now live and available for your reading enjoyment. The focus of this issue is Higher Education and Web Accessibility: Providing Training and Support for the Future.

I would like to thank Cyndi Rowland for all her hard work as this issues guest editor, and to Sean Keegan the ATHEN webmaster for all the effort he extended in getting it web-ready. I would also like to extend my personal thanks to each of the authors represented. I am sure you will find the articles as informative and as insightful as I have.

Ron Stewart, President
Access Technologists Higher Education Network

In this 46-minute recording from the 2006 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, we'll hear from Gregory Fierro, Feng Hou, and Cortney Wanca in a session entitled More Than Just an Internet Connection: What You Need to Know About Making Web Sites Accessible. Learn why web accessibility should be more than just an afterthought when it comes to Web site design and some basic techniques for compliance.

The 2007 Midwest Regional Conference, “Facing a River of Challenges,” will be held March 12–14, in Chicago, Illinois. This conference will focus on leadership challenges, mapping the relationships between learners and learning environments, enterprise resource planning, and campus IT security, and will feature two keynote speakers:

• Richard N. Katz, Vice President of EDUCAUSE—School of Athens or Mr. Ford's Factory: IT and the Future of Higher Education
• Tracy Mitrano, Director of IT and Policy and the Computer Policy and Law Program at Cornell University— From Soup to Nuts: Copyright, Social Networking Technologies, and Electronic Surveillance

In-depth, half-day preconference seminars will spotlight open source, learning spaces, Web accessibility design, and project management.

It isn't always a struggle, sometimes the work gets done without undue effort! I'm continuing to improve the accessibility of my web learning objects, and just finished one that a colleague uses in his molecular genetics course.

It's a straightforward exploration of bond energies affecting equilibrium concentrations. It's mostly ascii text, with two drop down menus and one text box where the result appears. There is a display table, which makes complete sense when "linearized" (read left to right by rows).

The small amount of effort it took went to doing such things as adding a noscript section and changing away from the now-improper use of header tags.

Nothing exciting - hardly worth writing about, except for the hope that somebody will see that retrofitting accessibility isn't always a bother.

Spring Semester 2007 is not far off! That's when our new Web Accessibility Regulation takes effect!

This regulation went through many drafts and was the subject of much campus conversation. We've had a series of campus meetings and work sessions about web accessibility after this regulation was issued, and it has been generally well received. Now we have the rubber getting ready to hit the road - my prediction is that things will go smoothly.

What's the situation on your campus?

New disability laws have come into force in the UK:

The new Disability Equality Duty (DED) places a legal obligation on public bodies to consider the needs of the disabled when planning services. In carrying out their functions, the Act says public authorities must "have due regard" to needs that include eliminating discrimination and promoting positive attitudes towards disabled people.

All we need now is for people to actually start meeting their obligations.

Web Accessibility at was discussed at Educause 06 (in a discussion session facilitated by Terry Thompson.) We had participants from both industry and higher ed in the discussion, and this helped reinforce one of the ideas which has been becoming apparent to me as I've been converting my learning objects to, ummm, "enhance" their accessibility. (For more on this see my earlier blog posts with similar titles.)

I've also presented on this topic in two venues, along with my colleague Lisa Fiedor, who works with faculty and instructional designers to help them overcome accessibility problems in online material. The preparation, presentations, and Q&A have also fed into this idea.

"It's awareness, more than effort." is the straight-forward idea. It's not hard to build in accessibility, if one is aware of it all the time, but awareness can lapse if not cultivated.

That's why I think it is important to keep up a "buzz" about it - and to share the methods that ease implementation. (It was delightful at our presentations to have people in the audience say that they had learned useful simple techniques.)Back to the Educause session - we saw that there also is an awareness dimension at work in bring education and industry priorities into alignment. Educause, the premier locale for education/industry discussions, can play a very beneficial role. I encourage all of us to continue to make the conference and Connect the discussion forum for advancing accessibility!

A new district court decision, reported at http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060907/cgth051.html?.v=55 says, "A federal district court judge ruled yesterday that a retailer may be sued if its website is inaccessible to the blind."

A 2002 decision was "U.S. District Judge Patricia Seitz said the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) applies only to physical spaces, such as restaurants and movie theaters, and not to the Internet." See: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-962761.html

These appear to be in conflict - do they each apply to their own districts, or does the newer one supplant the older one?

IANAL - do you know?

(But I do know which one I prefer. Can you guess which one that is? :-)