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.