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Thoughts about Accessibility and Distance Learning
Why Care About Accessibility?
If you go to the USF Academic Computing page for distance learning courses, you will find a that the university demands, as a requirement for access to distance-learning courses offered through Blackboard or WebCT, that one use a certain browser version. This is not uncommon on the Internet. Sometimes you see it as "best viewed under MonopolyBrowser 13.x," sometimes "Flush plug-in required," or the equivalent. Commercial ventures are certainly free to live or die by how well they meet customers' needs. But a public university is different, in two regards. First, we have a mission to make education accessible (and isn't distance learning supposed to be a way of meeting that goal?). Second, educational institutions (especially public ones) fall under the legal purview—and ethical guidance—of the Rehabilitation Act Section 508 regulations.
Why graphics are not universal
If you were blind, reading this web page with a speech synthesizer program, you would have no problems. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for Blackboard, pages with intensive use of graphics (unless one takes some care in designing them), all Flash movies, pages where links suddenly open up new windows, and pages where the layout is accomplished through the use of tables (which this page is not—more about alternatives later). Think about browsing without access to graphics or clues as to placement on a page. In fact, you can take a detour to a page that emulates a text-only browser to experience the limitations yourself (make sure you try a page with fancy graphics, like http://www.macromedia.com, or the university's main webpage, http://usfweb.usf.edu—which, by the way, is designed for accessibility).
S—l—o—w modems
The majority of our students do not have Roadrunner, DSL, or other high-speed services. The majority use dial-up modem lines, which run much, much slower than the rated speed of modems. Before you insert material on your webpage that requires megabytes of downloading, please go home (or visit a friend who has a dial-up line) and try waiting for your own page.
What is the instructional rationale?
Do you wear in-line skates to class? Well, why not? It would keep your students' attention! Most instructors of Internet-based courses do not design a course element just to keep student attention up, I am certain. Nevertheless, the creation of on-line content (I can think of one example on campus, though I would rather not embarrass the instructor) can occasionally be driven by well-meaning but perhaps poorly thought-out desires to amuse students at home. The deeper issue, which also applies to formats like Blackboard, is designing courses around experiences you structure for the students, which can be different on-line from what they can be in a classroom.