Hi, I'm Norman Coombs from EASI, E-A-S-I, Equal Access to Software and Information. Our mission is to collect and disseminate know how on how to make information technology accessible to people with disabilities, and to do that in a format that limits technical jargon.
The Publisher Jossey-Bass has a whole line of books on online teaching and they wanted to add a book to that collection, that would show those teachers how to make their on line courses accessible to students with disabilities, without their having to learn a lot of technical information.
The Internet already had a lot of content on it about how to make information technology accessible to people with
disabilities, but it was largely written by technical experts for technical experts. We wanted to create a book that would demystify accessibility and let faculty continue to use the same tools they already were using in creating their course content and end up with a product that was reasonably accessible for students with disabilities.
The book is based on three simple assumptions: One, that faculty already use computers to create their course content but they have limited knowledge even about the authoring tools that they were using; two, that faculty would be willing to make their course content accessible to students with disabilities if the process was made simple enough; and three, that they certainly would be willing to do that, especially if they saw that the process had benefits for all of the students as well as for themselves.
The book is divided into four major sections:
Section 1 deals with the general overview of accessible information technology, and that's Chapters 1 and 2. Section 2 deals with faculty authoring accessible course content, primarily using tools they already know and use, Chapters 3, 4 and 5. The third section deals with some of the more difficult issues in the fields of science, technology, engineering, math as well as in creating accessible multimedia. Last, creating online learning has to be a campus wide commitment, and not just relegated to one or two departments.
The general overview in Chapters 1 and 2 lets you understand the problem students with disabilities have in online courses or in surfing the web or in using any form of information technology - lets you empathize with their problems -- lets you understand some of the special software that they use, and points you to the web accessibility initiative guidelines and the Section 508 standards on accessibility.
Perhaps the most central concept in the book is the importance of using proper markup in creating your documents. What do we mean by that? You can put a header into your document so that it appears visually like a header by using file type and bold and other features. But the document doesn't know why you did that. It didn't know if you just wanted to emphasize that or whether it was a header. If you use the style sheet markup features in Word or in any other tool you're using, then the document itself is carrying the information of your structure in it so that the word processor displaying it understands the purpose of it, and that can help in the creation and the display of the document. But for people with disabilities, the assistive technology they use can recognize that something is a header, that it's a column, that it's a table. And being able to do that, the software can convey that information which you see visually, but it can display it to people with disabilities, no matter what their disability. That helps greatly with their understanding of your content.
There are still two areas that create online accessibility problems. Math, science, engineering and technology, is the one area, and multimedia programs as the other. With the development of MathMel, it is easy to create math in a computerized format. Design Science created MathType which works within word processors and lets faculty with limited computer knowledge still produce good math for the web. Design Science also created MathPlayer, a tool that lets students with disabilities access and make sense out of this math output. Graphics are common in these fields, and they are usually too complex to be described in a verbal way. At this point, there's no real way to do it online. You need to create hard copy, raised tactile drawings and send them to the student in advance of the class. While modern multimedia authoring software makes it easier for faculty to create multimedia, the problem to make it accessible is providing transcriptions and captions for students who are hearing impaired or deaf.
A quality online learning program requires cooperation between a number of different departments on campus, different technical fields, academic fields and administration fields. Frequently when we talk about accessible online learning, there's a tendency to try to put the whole responsibility into a department dealing with disabled students. The courts have insisted that disabled students belong to the entire campus, just as does any other student. So here again, we need to have a team work between a number of different departments. Creating accessible online learning requires creating a team to establish, manage and support online learning and accessible online learning. It requires good support from the top, from the administration, both verbal support and financial support.
The book has a section on resources that will give a you lot of good places where you can get help, if and when you need it. EASI, Equal Access to Software and Information, is dedicated to providing help for you in these kinds of areas. We do it with online courses, with webinars, and we're just glad to be a personal resource -- contact us at any time.