“New extensions to the Disability Discrimination Act, aimed at improving education and training, will soon affect online learning and computer training generally.” So begins an article in last weeks Age (see Impediment no barrier By Eric Wilson – December 8, 2003 – for full article). Despite the 180 odd mark up errors and a handful of errors on the Bobby accessibility checker, the article does indicate something I’m well too aware of.
I recently assisted Reece Lamshed from Binary Blue in testing the accessibility of websites in the Australian educational sector. Unfortunately many sites were unable to conform to even the most basic of requirements.
We have been developing an Accessibility Wizard. This is a tool that guides members of a website / application production team to ensure that the work they do on a project will comply with the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative.
In the meantime Accessibility is a growing issue for programmers developing both Learning Management and Content Management syetems for the educational sector.