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Distance Learning and Accessible Solutions
I am convinced that accessible and better on-line courses do not require significant programming skills on the part of faculty. Unfortunately, the existing tools that the university buys (Blackboard and WebCT) are not easily accessible to all students, but the legal issues there are the responsibility of the university. What can faculty do?
What experiences should students have?
In classrooms, we start designing instruction by deciding what experiences we want students to have to help them learn—with some limits, given that they are in a classroom. Why should the decision-making process be different for on-line courses? Being on-line is different from being in a classroom. It eliminates some options that classroom teachers have, but it provides others (if not all the whiz-bang options you see at this symposium, either for the typical student on a dial-in line or for a student with disabilities). The most important work for on-line courses, as in a classroom, should be thinking about the students.
Use style sheets
The layout for this webpage, as for every page in this presentation, is done using an option for webpage writing called "style sheets." Style sheets allow browsers that understand them to format material the way you want, but other browsers (if the page is done right) will still display the information sensibly. It "degrades" without eliminating the meaning or making using the page impossible.
Steal this page!
I did say you needn't be a programmer to teach an on-line course. But being willing to use someone else's basic HTML templates will help. If you like the way this page looks, borrow the coding. Use the File Send menu on this browser and e-mail yourself this page, then edit it to your satisfaction. Also download the style sheet for this page (right-click to download if you use a browser that won't let you view the style sheet directly). On the resources page are links to information about style sheets.
Beware FrontPage
If you do enjoy "hand-coding" webpages, I have one warning: Microsoft FrontPage has a mind of its own when you edit a page, and it often is at variance with accessibility (and good sense). You can configure FrontPage to use another editor (even Notepad, which will do for a page as simple as this), and I strongly encourage that step. I use Arachnophilia for my editing, but everyone who writes webpages should be aware of FrontPage's problematic idiosyncrasies.
Web Accessibility in Mind (a great resource, by the way) now has a workaround for those using FrontPage 2000.
Insist on accessible tools
If your university begins to approve programs that are only available on the web, it will be in a legally sticky situation if those programs are inaccessible to individuals with disabilities. The new versions of Blackboard and WebCT, two "courseware" packages, are supposedly compliant with Section 508 regulations on web accessibility. I hope so; but the fixes I have seen are only interim solutions. The broader problem of ease-of-use will not go away. Distance learning will not be attracting student credit hours, more fundamentally, if students have to wait eons for the Blackboard frames to load. The same is true for all institutions of higher education, and faculty members can remind administrators of the need for accessible distance-learning infrastructure.