eLearning stuff

In a recent blog Brian Kelly asks Is Second Life Accessible?. I’m still musing about Second Life, having had some indifferent experiences in the past. The discussion raised by Brian’s blog include a post from James Clay asking if people really think that  “all digital resources must be universally accessible to everyone” .

Brian then states

 “I’m currently working on a paper which argues against this view that services must be accessible to all or they shouldn’t be deployed. I’d welcome examples of why this is an inappropriate response, and the approaches organisations should be taking“

Having been away from Accessibility research for a couple of years I had hoped that institutional attitudes may have changed. The work we did a few years ago included a number of accessibility audits such as the Web site accessibility: what logo will we use today? where we used the WAI WCAG as a tool to see if accessibility was on the agenda for institutional websites. We were also commissioned by a number of organisations to conduct audits.

A few years ago there were numerous, similar audits carried out. Some were undertaken by commerical solution providers, academic (including this one by Brian Kelly) and some large scale studies such as the Disability Rights Commission’s Formal investigation report: web accessibility.

Pragmatism or Holistic?

The pragmatic approach (which gets an early outing in Ariadne in 2005) has lead to a holistic approach with Accessibility 2.0 being promoted by the great and the good. This paper criticises some work we did 6 years ago as

Without a user-focused or stakeholder approach to accessibility the obvious response to such results would be to continue pointing to guidelines (this has not necessarily worked for WCAG 1.0, why should we assume it will work for WCAG 2.0?) or to place our hopes in new technologies such as Web 2.0 (why should we assume that Web 2.0 technologies will succeed where hundreds of accessibility focused technologies such as repair and filter tools have had limited success?)

True, but the context of the original work seems to have been lost as it focused on what  institutions were doing as the spectre of the DDA was looming. At this time there were many similar audits being carried out, mainly by the author’s of the Accessibility 2.0 paper, it’s a shame that they didn’t comment on their own work.

The Holistic approach is a great idea but the key point is how to sell it to academics, learning technologists, web support teams etc…..and not forgetting the policy makers in the background - the marketing department.

Like it or not the issues of ‘compliance with the DDA’ or interpreting Guidelines and/or Recommedations as Standards are pretty much endemic in UK HE and FE.

Back to the orginal point of this post, to respond to Brian’s call for examples of why all digital resources must be universally accessible to everyone is an inappropriate response. Perhaps we may have done too good a job introducing the idea of accessibility into institutions. The easiest solution is to quote WCAG or threaten the DDA (have you heard the one about it being against the law not to put all lecture material on the Portal before lectures take place……), we end up with the lowest common denominator…..which like it or not is still WCAG 1.0.

There’s a raft of easily installed ‘compliance’ tools out there that produce nice reports that might or might not be used as a legal defence and numerous accessibility experts willing to perpeptuate the rumour that WCAG1.0 = accessibilty = you won’t get sued.

Tags:   Accessibility · wcag1 Comment