ED262 mylineONLINE: Exceptionalities and Accessibilities

The primary aim of this site is to provide faculty assistance in creating or converting online instructional materials to be accessible to the widest audience possible. The same techniques to make course content accessible can be used by anyone who has responsibility for creating public documents, videos and websites. We encourage all faculty and staff to proactively use these tools so that all public materials are accessible for anyone.

Cognitive Accessibility User Research describes the challenges of using web technologies for people with learning disabilities or cognitive disabilities. The research describes challenges in the areas of attention, executive function, knowledge, language, literacy, memory, perception, and reasoning. It is organized by user groups of the following disabilities: Aging-Related Cognitive Decline, Aphasia, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Autism, Down Syndrome, Dyscalculia, Dyslexia, and Non-Verbal. Additional user groups may be added to future versions. This document provides a basis for subsequent work to identify gaps in current technologies, suggest strategies to improve accessibility for these user groups, and develop guidance and techniques for web authors.

On April 2, the Department of Justice entered into a settlement agreement with edX, a major online college course provider, over alleged violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) related to the accessibility of online courses. EdX operates a web-based service that allows members of the public to view hundreds of online courses, including courses at more than 60 universities. Following a compliance review, the Justice Department determined that edX violated the ADA by not ensuring that online courses were accessible to people with hearing, vision and manual dexterity disabilities. EdX denied any ADA violations and disputed the Justice Department's findings.

Accessibility features include the ability to increase the size of text and images. For someone who needs large print to read, this can be a revelation, as so few books are published in this format. The colors can usually be changed to suit a person's requirements for their visual or cognitive condition. This can be of great benefit for someone with low vision, or with a cognitive reading impairment, as often a different color combination can be easier to read. E-books can also be read by a blind person using a feature where the text on screen is spoken to them with a synthetic voice, or sent to a connected device that uses a matrix of plastic pins to form braille letters, to be read by touch. These accessibility features are available on tablet computers such as the iPad and on Android tablets costing as little as £119 (about $192 or €140). And iPads and iPhones come with a built-in (free) text-to-speech capability called VoiceOver, which is very popular with people who are visually impaired.

Designing for People with Partial Sight and Color Deficiencies
by Aries Arditi, PhD

This page contains three basic guidelines for making effective color choices that work for nearly everyone. Following the guidelines are explanations of the three perceptual attributes of color -- hue, lightness and saturation -- as they are used by vision scientists.

The International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP) officially began accepting membership applications last week, an important step in elevating, defining, and improving accessibility as a profession around the world.

The new group is dedicated to supporting people working in accessibility through professional development, networking and the creation of a global community. The goal is to encourage more companies, groups and individuals to adopt and implement accessible products, services and content for people with disabilities.

It is well documented that students with disabilities are facing barriers in their pursuit of higher education, and institutions are having a difficult time fulfilling their legal obligation to ensure equal access. So it was surprising last month when the American Council on Education, in a letter to Sen. Tom Harkin about the proposed reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, completely dismissed a provision that would make it easier for its member institutions to meet the needs of students with disabilities.

The provision, Sec. 931 of the draft document, calls for guidelines to ensure that students with disabilities have access to "electronic instructional materials and related information technologies" that are "consistent with national and international standards." Colleges that do not use materials that conform to the guidelines may opt out by showing that they offer students with disabilities access to instructional and technological materials that are equivalent to those usedby non-disabled students, a standard the institutions should already be meeting.

For the nearly 8 million people in the US with some degree of vision impairment, the advent of ebooks and e-readers has been both a blessing and a burden. A blessing, because a digital library—everything from academic textbooks, to venerated classics, to romance novels—is never further away than your fingertips. A burden, because the explosion of ebooks has served as a reminder of how inaccessible technology really can be.

For more than a decade, the visually-impaired have been locked in an excruciatingly slow and circuitous battle against US copyright laws. And it’s left the visually-impaired with few options but to hack their way around digital barriers—just for the simple pleasure of reading a book.

Burlington, Vermont (July 29, 2014): The National Federation of the Blind, the nation’s leading advocate for equal access by the blind to technology and electronic information, and Heidi Viens, a blind parent from Colchester, Vermont, have filed suit (case number: 2:14-CV-162) against Scribd, Inc. Scribd offers an Internet-based “personal digital library” that allows sighted subscribers to access a collection of over 40 million titles. For a monthly fee of $8.99, sighted subscribers gain unlimited access to this large collection through its website and apps, as well as other services, such as publishing their own work by uploading it to the Scribd collection and participating in social media features. The case has been filed in the United States District Court for the District of Vermont and alleges violations of Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The website and mobile applications that Scribd uses to provide its subscribers with access to electronic documents are not accessible to blind people.