Adrian,

good authoring tools are an absolute necessity, as I hope I've made  
clear :-)

furthermore a peer to peer model lets everyone share in the workload,
that is like annotation, it doesn't rely on the author.

thanks

Jonathan


On 21 Jul 2004, at 11:56, A.Higginbotham wrote:

so it looks as if no one is using IMS Accessibility guidelines, ACLIP,  
or
TechDis meta data spec.

Extremely worrying.

Is this because very few people are actually producing E-learning  
content at
all, because they are doing so without using standards such as these or  
just
that the right people didn't respond to the survey.

Probably all three though I suspect that more people than we care to  
admit
are banging learning material in to any old Web based format for  
convenient
delivery.  Are standards a luxury most don't have time to utilise -  
discuss.
This doesn't of course mean we shouldn't have them but what are we to  
do to
turn this situation around?

Andy H did you say at the May SIG meeting that you knew of a couple of
projects that use IMS access app spec?
any further info.

Adrian Higginbotham,
Help2Access
University of Salford
Email [log in to unmask]
Tel: 01612952555.
Web: www.help2access.org.uk
Technology House, Lissadel Street, Salford M6 6AP.



-----Original Message-----
From: CETIS-TechDis Accessibility Mailing List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Sharon Perry
Sent: 21 July 2004 11:37
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Use of Accessiblity Specifications in E-Learning


Hello Everyone

You may recall way back in March, I asked if anyone was using any
Accessibility Guidelines or Specifications and how you were finding  
them.
So here, as promised, but rather late (many apologies) are the results  
of
that very quick straw poll.

In particular, I was trying to find out if anyone was using the  
following
Accessibility Guidelines or Specifications:

* IMS Guidelines for Developing Accessibility Applications - available
from http://www.imsglobal.org/accessibility/accessiblevers/index.html.
* IMS Accessibility for Learner Information Package (ACCLIP)
Specification - available from
http://www.imsglobal.org/accessibility/index.cfm.
* World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Authoring Tool Accessibility  
Guidelines
(ATAG) - available from http://www.w3.org/TR/ATAG20/.
* W3C User Agent Accessiblity Guidelines (UAAG) - available from
http://www.w3.org/TR/UAAG10/.
* W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) - available from
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/.
* W3C XML (eXtensible Markup Language) Accessibility Guidelines (XAG) -
available from http://www.w3.org/TR/xag.
* TechDis Accessibility Metadata Specification -
http://www.techdis.ac.uk/metadata/spec.html.
* Anything else I might have left out!

Thank you very much to everyone who replied and if anyone would like to
add any further comments, please feel free to continue them on this  
list.

Of the 9 replies received, everyone was trying to comply with WCAG to  
some
degree; one person was also using XAG as well as the RNIB Seeitright
Guidelines -
http://www.rnib.org.uk/xpedio/groups/public/documents/PublicWebsite/ 
public_
seeitright.hcsp.

Replies relating to WCAG Compliance:
Level 2 – 3,
Levels 1 & 2 – 1,
Levels 1, 2, & 3 – 1,
Unknown – 4.

General Accessibility Issues:
* Awareness of accessibility design issues amongst web designers was  
found
to be patchy. Solution: Guidance notes, which form part of the contract
with designers, were produced with links to sources of advice and  
further
information.

* Ensuring backward-compatibility.

* Deciding how to overcome the inherent inaccessibility of Flash (even
Flash 7, which although it incorporates some accessibility features
remains largely inaccessible).

* The representation of complex equations (we currently use mathtype in
the XML, which is rendered to LaTeX and gif formats).  A possible  
solution
is to provide a longdesc or detailed ALT for each equation, though there
are several thousand equations in our materials!

Specific WCAG & W3C Issues:
* Because of browser support issues, Priority 3 was just too dependent  
on
having a very standards compliant browser to be feasible in a university
environment.

* There were some areas where the guidelines concentrated on HTML
(HyperText Mark-up Language) validity to the detriment of ease of use,  
so
it was decided to go with whatever will provide the best end user
experience instead of sticking to the exact W3C recommendation.

* I have mainly relied on Bobby to check for accessibility problems,
rather than the standards directly but I have had a lot of problems at
times interpreting the results of Bobby and Bobby-type checks - when you
are told things like "check all colour combinations are suitable for
people with limited vision" I have little idea how to actually do that.  
I
have the same problem with the W3C standards information - I am often  
not
sure how to implement the instructions.

* Have found some of the standards listed, namely the W3C ones, hard to
apply.

* Using WCAG (and ensuring the correct use of CSS) significantly  
increased
the time required for implementation.  I would however expect this
overhead to decrease somewhat (although not be eliminated) as  
implementers
become familiar with both the guidelines and the tricks required to make
everything work as desired whilst keeping to "good" mark-up and within  
the
guidelines.

* Will probably be using WCAG and XAG, but we have to get the system to
work first!

CSS Issues:
* Have been trying for a 100% CSS site, but constantly being beaten back
by Internet Explorer's poor CSS compliance.

* Standards aren't properly implemented yet in the browsers likely to be
used by the students. So for instance I use tables a lot for layout  
rather
than CSS because I'm not confident how positioning in CSS will render in
the students’ machines.

The Positive Bits and Other Comments:
* Everybody in the team went through WCAG 1.0 in detail so that they
became very familiar with them.

* Our intention longer-term is to incorporate accessibility at the very
earliest stages of courseware production (i.e. the authoring and
specifications stage).

* By the way, the website work we do generally has far stricter
accessibility requirements than for e-learning.

* It must be said that it still occasionally happens that clients do not
have specific accessibility requirements, though far less often than  
6-12
months ago. So I guess this is positive progress!

* Have managed to create accessible interfaces, and we're now working on
rendering our dynamic output as XHTML (eXtensible HyperText Mark-up
Language), styled via CSS into accessible web content.

Best Regards

Sharon.

Sharon Perry,
Accessibility SIG (Special Interest Group) Co-ordinator,
CETIS (Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards),
University of Wales Bangor.

Website: http://www.cetis.ac.uk/accessibility.



Jonathan Chetwynd
http://www.peepo.co.uk     "It's easy to use"
irc://freenode/accessibility