An increasing appetite

E.learning Age, May 2007 by Alcock, Mike

Is accessibility rapid e-learning's Achilles' heel?

Around 18 per cent of the adult population is disabled1; some 10 million people whose spending power is estimated at £80 billion2. The disabled are therefore a significant part of the community and wise businesses will seek to engage with them, both as customers and as employees. Like all individuals the disabled have unique contributions to offer; the challenge is to look past the disability and provide them with the means to make their contribution.

It is particularly important that those authoring e-leaming courses address accessibility issues. Whether the courses are for training employees or providing commercial learning, the disabled should not be excluded from the learning. This involves extra effort and the inclusion of special features in authoring the course, but the benefits are that the e-learning can then engage the extended target audience that disabled accessibility allows.

A positive choice

Companies may have different motivations for ensuring their e-learning is accessible. The more enlightened will recognise that ensuring accessibility as a positive choice is not only the right thing to do but will give them access to the business or the skills of an often overlooked section of society. Other companies might take a pragmatic view of accessibility, recognising that if they fail to take the necessary steps they are exposing themselves to penalty under the law. In the UK, the relevant piece of legislation is the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) 1995 (and subsequent amending legislation) while in the US the equivalent is the Americans with Disabilities Act 1990. The DDA states that, as a service provider, a company might discriminate against a disabled person in two ways:

* by treating him or her less favourably than other customers because of their disabilities.

* by not making reasonable adjustments to the way services are delivered so that disabled people can use them.

The fact is that companies can be prosecuted for discriminating in one of these ways. The provision of e-learning is an area in which a company can be guilty of these omissions, which is why the accessibility of e-learning courses to the disabled has become a major concern to the industry in recent times.

Accessibility and IT

The IT industry has created various tools to enable the disabled better access to computer-based material. These include screen readers such as JAWS, Windows Eyes and Windows Narrator. These assist the visually impaired, while TAB navigation around screens assists those whose lack of motor control makes operating a mouse difficult. IBM is presently working on a specialist browser for the disabled, not surprisingly called the Accessibility Browser (A-Browser) which will give blind and partially-sighted people the same control over multimedia content that sighted people have.

The issue for developers is that additional content, or contextualised support as it is known, needs to be written to allow these various tools to operate to the maximum benefit of the disabled. The industry has provided guidance in the form of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines which provides 14 guidelines designed to help web developers and e-learning authors to design material which is as accessible as possible to the disabled. The guidelines fall under the headings in Box 1 and each includes particular "checkpoints" which are indicated as "Priority" 1,2 or 3.

W3C ranks conformance of material produced as W3C A, W3C AA, or W3C AAA.

The classification means that:

* Conformance Level "A": all Priority 1 checkpoints are satisfied;

* Conformance Level "Double-Á": all Priority 1 and 2 checkpoints are satisfied;

* Conformance Level "Triple-Á": all Priority 1,2, and checkpoints are satisfied;

In practical terms the Disability Rights Commission has stated that "if a site falls short of level AA Conformance, one or more impairment groups will find it difficult to gain access to content". The general view of opinion formers is that companies should seek to achieve AA standard and some legal opinion is of the view that to be deemed to have made "every reasonable effort" to make sites and learning accessible the standard should be higher than A but need not exceed AA.

Where rapid e-learning has traditionally struggled

Rapid e-learning is concerned with the automated delivery of courses without sophisticated programming. It has therefore been an issue for rapid authoring developers to include accessibility aids which could be implemented in an automated way. For example, TAB control could be included fairly simply but it was difficult to ensure that the direction of tabbing was logical on the screen in all situations. Similarly, Macromedia Flash animations have been felt to be impossible to make fully accessible - dynamic text variables and custom navigation elements were particularly troublesome. The result has been that in the past compromises have been made by including chunks of HTML content with limited interactivity to substitute for the more elegant Flash solutions which give highg-quality, rapid e-learning its edge.