Periodic Fable

Why should educational developers and learning technologists make efforts to ensure their e-learning materials are accessible?

There is of course the legal side of things in the UK: The Disability Discrimination Act, Part IV 2001(SENDA) requires responsible bodies to anticipate the requirements of disabled people or students and make appropriate adjustments. This applies to all the interactions a student makes with a school, college or University, and includes every element of course delivery.

More importantly, it is about equality of opportunity. One of the reasons I am so passionate about e-learning and online learning is that it is accessible to those who for various reasons cannot access learning in person – thos who cannot get to a face-to-face class by reason of disability, lack of transport, work commitments, young children, etc. etc.

While physical accessibility for those with visual, hearing or motor problems is obviously important, as well as provision for those with dyslexia, clear and unambiguous language should be used to support those whose first language is not the one you are teaching in.

I strongly believe also in ensuring intellectual accessibility – avoiding unecessary jargon, vocabulary and style that excludes some learners. Each subject discipline has a level which it expects its students to reach but one should not make language etc. unnecessarily difficult to understand. There are benefits to all students in clear and unambiguous instructions, and a functional and well-designed navigation and layout.

Moodle, for example, offers the following accessibility features:

• Conforms to XHTML 1.0 standards
• Uses stylesheets to control layout.
• Optional stylesheet selector can be implemented.
• Auto-detection – for use on mobile phones, TV sets, consoles and handheld devices.
• If content is web-based using HTML mark-up, then learning content can be used with Screen Readers.
• Works on multiple operating systems and browsers.

When creating pages within any VLE, sensible rules to follow are those for ensuring accessibility of any web page.

• Use simple presentation and design
• Provide meaningful text to hypertext links and a text alternative to images (Moodle forces this)
• Create HTML web pages rather than using proprietary document formats (e.g. Word documents)
• Avoid defining text appearance using tags and font colours
• Remove any unecessary menus, blocks and columns on the page
• Avoid large blocks of italicised text, as these can be hard to read for most users
• Use simple table formatting and avoid creating tables within tables
• Within the course, where possible, open links in the same window
• Include an option for students to compile and print materials