Accessibility/Universal Design

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Accessibility/Universal Design
Accessibility typically focuses on issues related to use of content by persons with disabilities; in some jurisdictions accessible content is required by law. Universal Design takes the issues surrounding accessibility and posits that content that is accessible is content that is well designed; so universally designed content is accessible to all.

Examples:
 * California Community Colleges require materials to be accessible Making Web Sites Work for People With Disabilities
 * Teachers' Domain prototype for customizing resources based on user need
 * Connexions has Brailled versions of two textbooks -- Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering and a Chemistry course. Rice disability services produced them for a student and we are putting copies with the courses. We aren't sure how useful they are to others or whether we are encapsulating them as well as possible, but we are hoping that these can be more universally useful now that they have been produced.

Challenges:
 * Education of OER providers, redesign of content, matching learner needs with content, adaptations.
 * The cost of doing captions for video can be prohibitive
 * Developing a standard approach for "statements of accessibility" on OER sites
 * One of the challenges OpenLearn has is in obtaining descriptions for visual components (images, shockwave, video clips etc) from older material, because no-one has the time to go back over it to create them.

Enablers:
 * Easy guidelines to follow, easy testing tools; separation of semantics and presentation; IMS AccessForAll Metadata
 * Using screen readers such as JAWS to evaluate the effectiveness of site design and content for visually impaired
 * Utilizing speech-to-text and innovative process technologies to produce cost-effective, searchable captions: Jim Glass at MIT CSAIL (see Lecture Browser) and MIT student/OCW alum Chris Johnson, are working jointly to create cost-effective, caption grade subtitles (currently at a 60%+ reduction of average market prices) and subsequently build searchable media archives. Additionally, they are developing community clip-sharing and aggregation tools that will enable project-building and sharing around specific topics of interest to educators and students.
 * Enablers here are authoring tools and hosting sites which do a lot of the work for you e.g. Moodle (and I'm sure educommons) has had a lot of effort put in to make the general framework accessible. Using XHTML is also enabling here because of better browser support.  You might want to link to the WCAG guidelines for accessibility.  Actually we have an OpenLearn unit on this subject http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=3049