Educational Technology and Accessibility Issues

Amy Fahey

CTER2 Assignment #10

CI335 - Fall 1999

In this assignment, we have been asked to focus in on factors that limit access to education, including financial, political, linguistic, knowledge, and disability barriers.  I would like to focus primarily on vision impairment as a disability barrier that stands in the way of individuals obtaining fair access to education and knowledge delivered through technological means.

There are a number of disability conditions that may prevent an individual from obtaining access to education.  These include psychiatric disabilities, learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, vision impairments, auditory impairments, systemic disabilities (such as disease) and impairments to mobility.  For each of these conditions there is usually an instructional strategy that applies to delivery of knowledge in a classroom setting; examples of these are determining where the student should be physically located within the classroom, providing volunteers to read printed materials, etc.  Technology and the introduction of the Internet and computers into instruction has added new challenges.

Of the above conditions, vision and auditory impairments are the most common factors and most obvious challenges to delivering content over the Internet.  For the purposes of this discussion, I will focus primarily on vision impairments, although the accommodations and adaptive technology used to overcome this barrier applies to some of the other conditions listed above.

Vision impairments include blindness and low vision, and more than two million Americans are considered legally blind.  This fact challenges the instructor or classroom teacher with the need to present information in an alternative format to traditional paper handouts.  While the Internet seems a likely choice because of the availability of screen access systems for computers (screen access systems convert webpages into Braille or “read” the pages through text-to-voice technology using the computer’s sound card), there are a myriad of other factors to be considered. 

First, the cost of such accommodations in school districts and universities, not only of hardware and software but of training and technical support.  The cost of 21 and 29” inch monitors, special Braille equipment, and training technical personnel to understand adaptive technology and use it all factors in to strain already thin resources.  Ease of use and compatibility with other systems can be a major consideration, especially when using a mix of adaptive technology and software written for Windows or DOS operating systems.   Finally, many web pages are not accessible for screen access systems simply because of their structure. 

This last problem with structure of web pages has been exacerbated by WYSIWYG HTML editors like Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver that write HTML code for the user.  These programs write HTML code, which resulting in less control and in many instances less accessible web pages.  Unfortunately, there is currently no WYSIWYG editor that creates 100% compatible code.  The best alternative may be to use SoftQuad’s HotMetalPro, an editor that had a “check accessibility” option built in.  Another option may be to use a basic text editor such as Window’s Notepad program.  In addition, many course management products being marketed for web-course development (like Blackboard’s CourseInfo) do little to provide accommodation for the disabled.  In fact, when I visited CourseInfo’s site at www.blackboard.com, and searched on the keyword “accessibility” in the knowledge base, I was greeted with “Sorry.  Nothing in our Knowledge Base related to that.” 

The National Federation for the Blind (www.nfb.org) has outlined some basic guidelines for maximum accessibility and usability of the web by vision impaired individuals that address the basic structure of webpages.  They  are: 

1. Avoid the use of multi-column presentations or tables. HTML tables are difficult or impossible to read or comprehend with most access technology for the blind.  This is because screen readers often read the material from left to right, ignoring table columns and rows. 

2. When encoding hypertext links on your web page, include enough words in the link so that it makes sense on its own.   When a blind or visually impaired individual accesses the web, the links may be read over the sound card.  For example, “CLICK HERE” links should be changed so that they make sense when read.  Be specific.  

3. Adjacent links should be separated with a blank character, image or bullet.

4. Include an alternative, short text description for all images on your web page.  This is accomplished with the “alt” tag. 

5. For simple images, such as icons performing the function of bullets, use simple Alt attributes.

6. Avoid using images as hypertext links; this is because if graphics are turned off or the user is using a text-only browser (such as Lynx), the link will be missed.

7. Provide alternative ways of accessing links other than image maps.  

8. If you have to create a web page with graphics or other non-accessible features because of presentation or other reasons, provide a text-only alternative. 

9. An optional e-mail address should be provided for a user to submit required information as an alternative to using forms.

10. Provide an alternative text description for Java applications because they are difficult for blind people to use when graphics are turned off

11. If your page is designed using HTML frames, consider including an alternative layout within a NOFRAMES element.  Many people are still using text-based browsers which cannot process frames.

Other guidelines for creating accessible web pages can be found at the following links: 

HTML authoring guidelines from the Trace Research Center of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin

 

References from the Web Access Initiative of the World Wide Web consortium

 

http://www.cast.org/bobby - (Web site with analysis tools to analyze web pages and report accessibility problems)

http://www.gsa.gov/coca/WWWcode.htm - Center for Information Technology Accommodation offers technical guidelines in designing and coding accessible HTML documents.

http://www.austin.ibm.com/sns/access.html - Web site addresses the issue of accessibility by listing accessiblity guidelines, checklists, and tools for developers and Web authors.

There has been and there is much progress and much research being done in this area, which will hopefully make accessibility a priority and bring these issues to the forefront.  The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) is a major initiative with industry partnerships committed to ensuring that Internet technology is accessible to all.  Their World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Content Accessibility guidelines also include an accessibility checklist and recommendations for using cascading style sheets (a method of implementing a style on one page and transferring it to other pages, which would make accessibility efforts and navigation controls more easy to implement on a number of pages).