Larry Goldberg

Geoff Freed

ACCESSIBLE AND ONLINE - YES, IT IS POSSIBLE

Larry Goldberg
WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM), Boston, MA, USA
Geoff Freed
WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM), Boston, MA, USA

Keynote Summary

Students with disabilities are increasingly placed in inclusive classrooms where they learn alongside their peers. This poses a challenge for teachers and students because instructional materials may not be available in a form that is accessible to the disabled student. Inaccessible materials stigmatize students with disabilities by preventing them from using the same materials as their peers and can limit their educational opportunities. With technology prevailing in classrooms, students with disabilities face severe challenges in keeping pace with their classmates.

As more and more educational materials are published on the Web, and as distance-learning Web services become mainstreamed, disabled students are once again at risk of being left behind. Despite an increased awareness of the need to design accessible on-line learning materials, many Web authors and publishers still do not create and distribute accessible electronic materials, and few understand why access is a critical need. Some states and universities have instituted policies mandating or recommending accessibility, yet the majority of disabled students still operate at a disadvantage in the on-line learning world.

Properly designed distance-learning materials can be made accessible to students with disabilities, however. Proven techniques exist which permit authors to add closed captions and audio descriptions to popular multimedia formats, and the software to do so is readily and freely available. Recommendations for general Web-site accessibility have been available for several years, and newly published guidelines that illustrate the basics of Web accessibility in clear language are now on-line. In contrast to five years ago, now any author or publisher who wants to, or is required to, make their electronic materials accessible has many resources at hand.

Developers who incorporate access solutions may find that these modifications bring benefits to the wider student population, as studies of multimodal learning have shown. The principles of universal design, designing to meet the needs of as many users as possible, provide a new dimension for improving the usability of educational materials for all students.

Live Keynote Presentation (now Archived for your viewing)

April 23, 2003
1800 GMT (0800 HST, 1100 PDT, 1400 EDT)
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TCC 2003 Online Conference
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