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A Public Consortium Emphasizes the Importance of LMS Accessibility
10/3/2006
By Rebecca André, Ohio State University (OSU) Technology Enhanced Learning and Research, Mark Felix, University of Arizona, Tucson, Alan Foley, University of Wisconsin System Administration, Dawn Hunziker, University of Arizona, Tucson, and Ken Petri, OSU Web Accessibility Center
In this article we explore the state of LMS accessibility and provide both a broad review of LMS accessibility and the practice of site and tool design, and attend to the successes and challenges of LMS accessibility.
Changing Design Practices
Yogi Berra once said, “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is.”
From a sociological perspective, accessibility is not a practice in theory but a practice of individuals with a specific set of ideas about design that come from their training and cultural position. Their notions of design and what makes it good design are long held. Changing this requires a challenge to design at its core. We must encourage designers and developers to change their practices and incorporate accessibility, but we also need to appeal to the core passions that draw designers to their profession in the first place.
An interesting way to think about this views computers as theater – an experience that varies from viewer to viewer and that is dependent on varying experience, attitudes, and ideas. Brenda Laurel suggests that humans working with computers are not merely “users,” but human agents. The potential that a person has, not as merely a computer user, but as a person acting with agency to shape her/his own experience adds endless possibly to the conception of Web-based tools. This notion of the agent also forces Web designers to think about the people who will be using their Web site – what experiences, background, learning styles, and abilities they bring to the experience. Web designers often do not make these considerations for a variety of reasons.
The biggest challenge of accessibility is to convey an understanding of an experience that is different than one’s own. To generalize, designers can be considered in their way of looking at the world. Their expertise is in understanding and controlling visual presentation. They find tools such as screen readers extremely difficult to work with. Moreover, accessibility can not always be validated with a simple “Bobby” like tool. There is no “spell check” for accessibility. Designers often have no background to make decisions about assistive technologies or the way they are used, yet they are the most important group in terms of those whose behavior needs to change.
Accessibility is a process. Accessibility can’t be learned in a day. Working with designers on accessibility requires a sustained effort on the part of Web accessibility practitioners. The impact and implications of accessibility may not become immediately clear after a single presentation from an expert. To expect designers to implement accessibility with a singular workshop training is unrealistic. Accessible design often requires an experiential learning process where designers first understand and then learn to incorporate the specific use cases for accessibility. Designers require an opportunity to follow up on accessibility with additional questions and concerns as they begin to grapple with the specifics of accessible design. Enough emphasis cannot be made that leaving accessibility to the end of a project is never a workable strategy and that good practice includes accessibility as a design parameter, not a feature request.
Course management system creators should actively engage the community and solicit input from people using computer technologies in multiple ways.
Learners with Disabilities and How They Access a Web-Based LMS
The four main categories of disability that must be accommodated are visual, motor, auditory, and cognitive. Visual disability encompasses blindness, low-vision, and color-blindness. Low-vision users often increase the font sizes within the browser or use some sort of screen magnification software. About 5 percent of men in the United States have one of the three forms of red-green colorblindness. There are other forms of colorblindness, but the red-green types are the most prevalent. For colorblind users, it is essential that checks be run to make sure foreground-background contrast is adequate and that meaning within iconography and text is not conveyed solely by color. Blind learners typically access a LMS via a screen reading program that voices the textual content of Web pages (or, for the deaf-blind, produces refreshable Braille output).
Motor disability encompasses users who have undergone traumatic injuries or have congenital diseases or other disorders that affect gross or fine motor control. Interaction with a Web-based LMS for these learners typically cannot involve the mouse. Keyboard navigation of all functionality is necessary.
Auditory disability encompasses full and partial hearing loss. To accommodate deaf learners, audio content must have synchronized captioning. Interfaces cannot rely on audible cues for interactivity.
The largest group of learners with disabilities includes learners who have some form of cognitive disability. This constituency includes people with various attention disorders, reading impairments, linguistic and verbal comprehension deficits, problem-solving deficits, and graphic and math comprehension deficits.
It should be noted that many of the so-called accommodations that have to be made to make the LMS accessible enhance learning for all users. For example, keyboard navigability speeds input generally. Captioning of content provides access in noisy environments (or places where quiet is enforced). Captioned content is also beneficial for people trying to learn a language or those who learn best when presented content through more than one mode of delivery. And the text transcripts used in captioning can be indexed by LMS search features, facilitating accurate and comprehensive lookup.
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