More on online learning and the visually impaired

By Tony Bates, on August 31st, 2010

On August 23 I posted about online learning and students with disabilities. In the post, I asked readers for suggestions about how to improve the accessibility of my own site and where people could find more information about standards for accessibility for the visually impaired.

I received an excellent response, both as comments to the blog and as private e-mails, and thought it might be useful to aggregate these into a single posting.

Resources

Equal Access to Software and Information, EASI.  This is a nonprofit organization which has been in existence for some fifteen years.  Its president, Dr. Norman Coombs, professor emeritus of Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, is one of the most knowledgeable people about web accessibility.

The Web Accessibility Initiative: http://www.w3.org/WAI/ Anne Pemberton commented though: ‘One problem with the W3C guidelines is that they presume all non-disabled users are text-centric and can do without images or illustrations. You need to make your own judgements on eliminating graphics.’

SSB Bart Group: https://www.ssbbartgroup.com/campaigns.php?ad=108&kw=W3C%20disabilities&gclid=CLiw87aG0qMCFUmA5QodV1g7vQ

Joe Clark’s Best Practices in Online Captioning: http://joeclark.org/access/captioning/bpoc/

Rudy Sims’ disabilityresourceexchange.com He has set up a discussion forum on online education and accessibility (this site covers all disabilities, not only blindness).

Several government agencies have developed guidelines or best practices on web accessibility. The provincial government of BC has developed the following:

Hyatt, G. (2002) A Simplified Web Accessibility Guide Vancouver BC: BC Ministry of Advanced Education/HRDC

For checking the accessibility of a web site:

WordPress. Several people commented that WordPress has built in a number of the standards for accessibility so that posts are automatically accessible to the visually impaired. However, when posting in WordPress, it is important to follow certain guidelines which are given below under ‘Tips’. (I know a number of institutions, such as UBC, that are using WordPress as an online learning environment instead of an LMS for some courses.)

Blackboard Inc. announced on August 12 that the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) awarded Blackboard Learn(TM) its Nonvisual Accessibility Gold Certification, stating that the company’s software was the most accessible education application that the NFB had tested and making it the first and only learning management system to achieve certification. (I would be interested in any reader’s experience of Blackboard Learn’s accessibility for the visually impaired).

Moodle The U.K. Open University’s working group on accessibility has drafted specifications for the improvement of the accessibility of the Moodle course management system for version 1.7. There is also an online forum to discuss these specifications. Again, I would be interested in hearing form any reader willing to post their experiences of applying or using these specifications.

UBC has a Wiki on accessibility:

Freedom Scientific’s JAWS Reader works with a number of systems. JAWS reads aloud what’s on the screen.

Tips

1. The most common advice given when posting in WordPress was to use the alternate text box when loading images to provide a descriptor of the image and to label all graphics in simple, clear language

2. Second, overall design of the web site is critically important. Anne Parsons made the following comment:

web accessibility at its heart is how the site is organized as a whole.  If it is logically laid out, if the links make sense, then it is truly accessible.  On the other hand, there are web sites which observe all the basic rules for accessibility, but they are so badly laid out that they are frustrating to users.  This has nothing to do with alt-tags or labeling graphics.  If the page isn’t laid out logically, everyone will have trouble accessing it, not just the blind or visually impaired.

3. Use colours carefully to provide contrasts. Use a different colour from the text for hyperlinks, and also underline hyperlinks. Don’t use ‘click here’ but make make the hyperlinks short and self-explanatory (e.g. Equal Access to Software and Information)

4. Ann Parsons commented:

keep in mind that a person who is blind cannot see the screen as a whole, that is paramount when trying to understand how blind people use The Web.  A sighted person sees a web page as an entire thing, a gestalt.  A person who is blind has to navigate a new web site line by line and build the picture of the site in the mind.  This is sometimes difficult, especially if the blind person does not have good visualization skills.

5. Use headings as much as possible to break up the page. This helps the user to know where they are.

6. Content: if you are using acronyms, try to provide the full definition as well.

7. Cindy Underhill notes:

the whole issue of dealing with media files is another challenge. To be truly accessible, a transcript should be provided. But, if you are embedding someone else’s video from YouTube (or another service) – most likely a transcript is not provided. Transcripting is fairly expensive.

I would add that good video will deliberately exploit the visual element, but there are problems with semantically converting the visual elements of video into words.

Comments

Despite all the efforts to improve accessibility to online learning for the visually impaired, there are still huge challenges, even allowing for the visualy impaired being accustomed to huge challenges. Particularly where visual elements are critically important for learning, it may be necessary not just to follow accessibility standards, but to re-design specifically for the visually impaired.

Also, the situation in Canada is different from that in the USA. The USA has Federal legislation that requires educational institutions to take all reasonable steps to accommodate learners with visual impairment (although this legislation has yet to be tested for online courses). No such legislation exists at the federal level in Canada, although some provinces (e.g. Ontario) are considering similar legislation. This leaves it very much to individual institutions, and in particular to the professionals working in e-learning, to make sure that online courses and programs are as accessible as possible to people with visual and other challenges.

Lastly, this is an important area of knowledge in which I am not an expert. Thus if you have any other suggestions or comments to make on this topic, and other sites that can provide better information, please let me know.

Thanks

Many thanks to the following who contributed to this post:

Gary M. Lewis

Karen Elliott, Contact North

Anne Louise Pemberton, Educational Synthesis

Ann Parsons, Portal Tutoring

Patricia Porter, Leading2Learning

Natasha Boskic, External Programs and Learning Technologies, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia

Cindy Underhill, Office of Learning Technologies, UBC

August 31st, 2010 | Tags: , , , | Category: Blogs, Featured, Teaching and learning, Technology, Tony's Blog, Tweets, access, disabilities, students | Leave a comment

A challenge to new Canadian copyright law

By Tony Bates, on August 27th, 2010

Valiente, G. (2010) New copyright law hits opposition Canada.com, August 23

‘Last week, the Canadian Association of University Teachers and the Canadian Federation of Students filed an objection with the Copyright Board over a proposed new royalty program. The program was proposed by Access Copyright, a private non-profit body that licenses literary works to businesses and public institutions.’

As I understand it, Access Copyright acts as agents for royalty collection for all copyright materials used in courses by Canadian universities and colleges. This provides one stop shopping for copyright clearance and payment of a fee per intended user. Thus if I wanted to use in a distance education course an academic article from a journal published by a commercial publisher for a course of 30 students, in the old days I would pay $3.39 + 10 cents per page per student for the right to distribute this material to each of of the 30 students. Thus the university would pay $120 roughly per year per article.

However, Access Copyright wants to apply the same rules for hyperlinks. It is not clear from the report if this is for hyperlinks to anything, or just hyperlinks to copyrighted academic material. Furthermore, they want to up the costs to $45 per student. So if I want to hyperlink to an academic article, this would now cost the university $1,350 per article for a class of 30 students – some hike!

As the report says ‘The case will be heard this fall in front of Canada’s Copyright Board and is expected to highlight the complexities of updating an analog-era copyright law to cover works for an academic community that’s adapting quickly to the digital era.’

Comment (from ‘Puzzled in Kitsilano’)

I find this somewhat curious. There are two kinds of publication, open access and commercially copyrighted publications. Most publications are now available in digital versions, but the commercially copyrighted publications require a password and usually online payment to access the articles. University libraries often pay substantial fees to license commercially published articles available online, and make them available to ‘university members’ (e.g. staff and students), as do university bookstores for course materials.

Why would anyone now need to go through Access Copyright, unless they can provide a quicker and cheaper online service than going directly to the publishers?

For instance to buy a single article from Taylor and Francis’s publication, Distance Education, you would pay only $30, so why would I ask the university to go through Access Copyright and charge students $45? (And why is the academic journal Distance Education not open access? I can understand the need for a publisher when it was printed and needed physical distribution, but now it’s completely online. Why do they still need a publisher, especially since none of the contributors or their institutions get any royalties? But that’s another matter.)

If anyone can answer these questions, I would be really grateful.

August 27th, 2010 | Tags: , , , | Category: Bibliography, Canada, Featured, intellectual property and copyright, national, regional and international strategies | 3 comments

Graph on costs of U.S. college education

By Tony Bates, on August 26th, 2010

US News (2010) The average costs of a U.S. college education US News, August 24

This is an interactive graph based on figures from the National Center for Educational Statistics for the school year 2007-8 for different types of US college.

The average annual tuition (plus expenses) at a private nonprofit four-year college is about $35,000. Financial aid does not help a great deal at these rates – you still have to find $20,000. For a public four year school, the difference after financial aid is about $8,000 a year – or $32,000 over four years.

Nothing new here, but I do like the graphs! If you like these kind of graphics, see Keith Hampson’s Higher Education Management Group’s posting, College in America (Infographic).

August 26th, 2010 | Tags: , , , | Category: Bibliography, Strategies, planning and management, costs and benefits, economic impact | One comment

Ontario students’ vision for the Ontario Online Institute

By Tony Bates, on August 25th, 2010

Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (2010) The Ontario Online Institute: Students’ Vision for Opening Ontario’s Classrooms Toronto ON: OUSA

OUSA have produced a superb document outlining their position regarding the proposed Ontario Online Institute. While strongly supporting the concept, OUSA raises a whole set of key issues that need to be addressed if the new Institute is to be successful. They also recommend a consortium model based on that used by Open Universities Australia. As well as identifying many of the issues that the Ontario government will have to address, such as quality assurance, credit transfer, student learning and advisory support, 24/7 services, student aid, the report also gives the best overview I have seen of the current state of online learning in Ontario, Canada’s largest province by population (13 million).

Comments

The consortium model is primarily a challenge to both the government, to put in place a governance structure and funding that will require existing universities to work together in a coherent and meaningful way, and to the Ontario universities themselves, who in the past have talked collaboration but in practice have done little. For instance, it is much more difficult to transfer credits between institutions in Ontario than almost anywhere else in Canada. Without agreement to accept automatically course credits from partner universities, any consortium model is doomed to failure.

The governance of the Institute will require detailed agreements about revenue sharing, program planning, quality assurance and student support that will require partner universities to yield much more autonomy to the Institute than any Ontario university has shown the stomach for in the past. I do hope the universities – or at least enough to make a workable consortium – will step up to the plate, because Ontario needs the increased flexibility and access such an Institute will bring if it is to have a hope of achieving its goal of 70% access to post-secondary education.

Lastly, the OUSA document makes a very important point:

it is important to note that many aspects of the Institute will depend heavily on the initial design, and many of the solutions presented in the following pages will only be achievable if a heavily integrated consortium model, such as the one employed by the OUA, is selected for the Institute….students wish to highlight that the Institute will have significant long-term effects on the post- secondary sector in Ontario, and that all stakeholders and partners deserve an opportunity to provide input into this process. With only a vague notion of what the Institute is meant to do, students have found it difficult to participate in these deliberations and are concerned with how little information is available months after the initial announcement. Moving forward, students urge the government to facilitate real input from all stakeholders.

I do anticipate that the Ontario provincial government will make an announcement early in the fall, as there is an election due on October 6, 2011, and the government will want to have something in place by then. However, this is a very short timetable for establishing what will be a major new development in online learning. Achieving the right balance between consultation and action will perhaps be the biggest challenge for the government.

In the meantime, congratulations to OUSA who have produced by far the most substantial public input to this process to date.

August 25th, 2010 | Tags: , , , | Category: Bibliography, Canada, Featured, Strategies, planning and management, accreditation, design of virtual learning organizations, national, regional and international strategies, partnership and consortia, quality and quality assurance | One comment

Using the web for open peer review

By Tony Bates, on August 25th, 2010

Cohen, P. (2010) Scholars test web alternative to peer review New York Times, August 23

Interesting article about the Shakespeare Quarterly‘s experiment in open peer reviewing.

‘The journal posted online four essays not yet accepted for publication, and a core group of experts….were invited to post their signed comments on the Web site MediaCommons, a scholarly digital network. Others could add their thoughts as well, after registering with their own names. In the end 41 people made more than 350 comments, many of which elicited responses from the authors. The revised essays were then reviewed by the quarterly’s editors, who made the final decision to include them in the printed journal, due out Sept. 17.’

The article provides an excellent overview of the pros and cons of online peer review.

August 25th, 2010 | Tags: , , , , | Category: Bibliography, English, Strategies, planning and management, faculty development and training, subject areas | Leave a comment
 
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