O
nline delivery offers some wonderful opportunities for innovative practice in teaching and learning. But what happens when students are unable to access the course? Students are using the web in an increasing variety of ways. They may be on mobile phones or tablet PCs. They might be listening to the site with a screen reader, viewing it with a screen magnifier or navigating it without the use of a mouse. When a web site is built to be flexible enough to cater to all these scenarios so that a student can access learning materials regardless of what technology they are using, the site is said to be accessible. The most obvious group that benefits from an accessible course website, is students with disabilities.
The concept of accessibility is extremely important in education, not only because we have a clear moral obligation to give equal opportunity to students with disabilities, but because the idea of excluding any student from receiving fair access to course materials undermines the learning process. Veteran practitioners in distance education will have much experience with the technical obstacles that can make access difficult. Students in rural or remote locations, for example, may have limited access to broadband or up to date hardware. So the range of “no access” scenarios goes from the very high tech (web enabled handheld devices) to the very low tech (old computers on slow modem connections), to devices used for assisting users with disabilities (screen readers, screen magnifiers, navigation aids, etc.)
It is also interesting to look at how the number of people that require online learning to be accessible is growing:
• 20% of the population in Australia reports having a disability (ABS, 2003)
• The population is aging
• The number of mature-age and ‘life-long learners’ is growing (Bringing Learning to Life, 2002)
• The number of portable devices (mobile phones, PDAs, etc.) used for going online is increasing
One key thing to realise is that the definition of disability is not as narrow as one tends to assume. Can you think of someone you know who is colour-blind? A diagram with information differentiated by the colours red and green may be inaccessible to them. They would be unable to learn from it. Have you ever increased the text size on a document to make it easier to read? Inevitably, as we get older our eyesight becomes weaker. As I write this, even I have my document enlarged to 125% on screen, and some people would consider me a spring chicken. While these attributes are not normally considered ‘disabilities’ in common parlance, they are still addressed by accessibility guidelines. An accessible website will let the user change the text size on screen, whereas an inaccessible site may not. For a student, a little thing like that can make the difference between learning something, or giving up. Drop out rates among students with disabilities are unusually high at close to 50% (Post-Secondary Education Consortium, 2000). That only accounts for people who declare that they have disabilities and are classified as such. For the many of us who simply have vision that is not what it used to be, a characteristic that will increase with growing numbers of adult learners, we might just get frustrated with course material and decide to give up.
Fortunately, there are international guidelines, developed by the World Wide Web consortium (www.w3c.org) that help us ensure that no student is excluded from the online experience. It is these international standards that are the basis for the accessibility compliance that is required by Australian law. Still, according to a recent study, up to 59% of university websites are not accessible to students with disabilities (Loiacono, 2004). We have a fair way to go before all learning is inclusive, but the word is spreading and awareness is the key.
Fortunately, the recent redesign of the University of Sydney website has made it compliant to the minimum international requirements (there are three levels, ‘priority 1’ being the minimum and ‘priority 3’ being the most complete). However, there is no current institutional process for making course websites compliant.
What can I do to make my sites and learning materials more accessible?
It is not hard to make a site accessible to, at least, the minimum set of guidelines–it just takes a bit of knowledge. Here are some approaches you can take to make your websites and course material more accessible:
• Ask for it. If someone else builds your material or website, ask them to make sure it is accessible. If they do not know what you mean, you can send them to CoCo’s Accessible Online Learning guide:http://coco.edfac.usyd.edu.au/Guides/Accessible_Elearning. At the very least, ask them to incorporate the W3C quick tips shown below.
• Learn the basics. If you create some of your own HMTL documents, then learn the accessibility basics. Most of the guidelines are encapsulated in the W3C quick tips below.
• Remember the golden rule. The golden rule of accessibility is “Provide an alternative”. If you think someone may not be able to access certain material because, for example, it is entirely visual, then provide a text description. When you design projects, include options that take into account different kinds of abilities. Making material accessible should never mean that you refrain from using rich learning material that would benefit the majority of the class. For example, you would not remove a video simply because someone hard of hearing may not be able to access the sound. You just include a transcript or captions with it. The trick is to provide an alternative.
How do I do it myself?
• One day at a time. One way to learn the accessibility basics is to do it one day at a time: www.diveintoaccessibiliy.com has the information you need broken down into 30 days of bite-sized pieces.
• Go to a workshop. The Royal Institute for the blind offers workshops on web accessibility. CoCo also offers occasional workshops on accessible online learning.
• Read up online. The W3C Standards organisation has all the information you need but it tends to be overwhelming for the uninitiated. If you are not a “technical person”, you may find this University of Aberdeen site more digestible: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/diss/ltu/accessibility. The CoCo Online Learning Guide mentioned above, has links to other useful resources.
• Grab a book. The University of Sydney library has recently purchased several books on web accessibility including Maximum Accessibility and Constructing Accessible Sites, the latter being for the more technically savvy.
Starting small
If you are new to online technology, the guidelines might sound a bit overwhelming at first. It is important to know that you don’t have to do everything all at once. Applying even a few of the 10 quick tips below will make a big difference in making your materials more accessible. Apply as many as you can, and little by little, you may find that these considerations become second nature. For example, it used to be common practice to title a link “click here”. We might have said, “to download the slides, click here.” It takes no extra time to apply tip #4 and put the meaning into the link itself: “download the slides”. Now the link can be understood out of context. With this small change, the links on your page become more accessible. A student using a screen reader to read her all the links on a page will no longer get an endless list of “’click here’s, but a meaningful and navigable set of options, such as “’Faculty site’, ‘reading questions’, ‘download the slides’.”
How do I know if my site is accessible?
The easiest way to do a quick site test is to run it through a validator. This is as simple as going to a website, typing in the address of your site and clicking submit. The “Cynthia Says” validator at http://www.contentquality.com is one easy to use validator that allows you to select what level of compliance you wish to test for. When you submit the address of an accessible page the resulting report shows that all guidelines are either met, not applicable or not verifiable. In contrast, if you submit a page that is not accessible, then “No” will appear at least once in the right column, indicating that the guideline to which it refers has not been met.
To be accessible to the minimum set of guidelines (in other words, the standard required by Australian law), you need to comply with the checkpoints listed below.
International Guidelines Checklist
Checklist for all ‘Priority 1’ (minimum compliance) checkpoints
(Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Checklist).
One approach to inclusion, that is popular for its ease of implementation, is the ‘wait until it’s necessary’ strategy. This usually means that no specific effort is made to make online course material accessible unless it becomes known explicitly that a student with a disability will be part of the class. Then efforts are made to accommodate that individual. There are many reasons why this approach is insufficient. One of the more obvious is that it is left up to the individual student to point him or herself out, and make their disability known. In most cases, where the disability is quite subtle (such as the example of low vision mentioned earlier) the teacher will simply never find out. It is unlikely that someone who requires larger text or who is colour-blind will specifically contact the coordinator requesting accessible material. Therefore, no efforts will be made on behalf of the many students who, although they do not have a reported disability, will still be disadvantaged by inaccessible design.
By following a few simple guidelines we have the opportunity to make our courses available to many students that would otherwise get left behind. Even just starting with a few of the quick tips can make a difference. So what are we waiting for?