Web Accessibility
Zoe Gillenwater (2007) is spot on when she says that there is good news and bad news regarding web accessibility for persons with some type of disability. She says the good news is that not everything is inaccessible; the bad news is that not everything is accessible. To test this statement, I used WebAim.org’s WAVE web-based service to evaluate CSU-Global’s portal (past the “Go To Class” link), the OTL542 course delivered by Blackboard, as well as my own corporate LMS-based online university. I got bad news all the way around.
The primary problem with all three subjects is that they use HTML <frameset> as a way of structuring the web site. This was very surprising to me for the CSU-G portal, as I believe it receives federal funding and therefore falls under the Section 508 requirements. I suspect, however, that CSU-G is compelled to use frames as this section of the portal is actually hosted on the Blackboard.com domain. Using <frameset> allows delivery of content from Blackboard and still presents a unified portal to the student (access to library, student services, etc.)
I’m surprised that Blackboard is using frames because their market is academic organizations that fall under Section 508. Reviewing Blackboard’s statements about working towards accessibility seem to recognize that they understand this issue.
Other minor issues that I found included missing “alt” attributes on images, event handlers, hidden text, etc. Missing “alt” tags seems inexcusable to me, as they are 100% under the control of the web developer, and incredibility easy to work into the development process.
I also looked at my corporate LMS – hosted by Mindflash.com – with respect to accessibility. It uses HTML frames, of course that’s a no-no, but one that is unavoidable. Our biggest problem stems from using tables in Word to control the positioning of our images. We create content in Word, and the LMS converts that to HTML pages. The conversion process often places images incorrectly, so we’ve found that putting images into table rows controls that conversion process. Unfortunately, the screen readers pick up those tables as structure and attempt to read it as real data. The images are also missing “alt” tags (of course). I’m not hopeful that I can find a way around this one – both with respect to Word and the ‘political’ discussion with my team about the need to support some level of accessibility. Our learners must be fully able-bodied in order to actually do the job they are learning about, so I have little, if any, persuasive powers for change.
Thinking about what I found showed me the truth in Gillenwater’s statement. Web accessibility is at the crosshairs of two powerful forces – the users who need the access (backed by their federal government who sees fit to use funding as a way of coercing compliance 
), and the developers who must create it. Developers using Web 2.0 platforms (blogs, wikis, personal web sites), where a driving philosophy is that everyone is able to be an author/publisher of web content, are at the mercy of the platform publishers to provide some level of accessibility. Many of the other Web 2.0 technologies, such as podcasts and PDFs may also present issues for access-dependent users. WAVE displayed warnings for any type of linked content, Flash and forms.
Since many developers for online education are corporate entities, with their own set of economic constraints, it seems that finding accessible solutions may be low on their list of requirements. Given that the population of users who requires these accessible solutions is usually significantly smaller than those who don’t, I can’t find fault when portals like Blackboard come up short. On the other hand, I have family members who overcame challenging cognitive disabilities because their accessibility barriers were removed … at last. I watched this person struggle to receive an education worthy of his intelligence; an experience I’ll never forgot or take lightly.
Gillenwater, Z. (Producer) (2007, October 16). What does accessibility mean? [Episode 1]. Web Accessibility Principles. Tutorial retrieved from http://www.lynda.com/home/DisplayCourse.aspx?lpk2=448
WebAIM. (2009). WAVE (Version 4.x) [Software as service]. Available from http://wave.webaim.org/
