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Re: Chronicle of Higher Education article"Colleges Lock Out Blind Students Online" Chronicle Articleand form control labeling

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From: Gunderson, Jon R
Date: Dec 16, 2010 11:03AM

I would just like to note that I did not write the Chronicle Article, Marc Perry did.

He was writing an article on the student with blindness and found my data in the Educause archive and interviewed me.

I hope people read the whole Chronicle article it is not just about the data I collected.

The Chronicle, not me, decided to use the data I presented as a part of my poster presentation at the 2010 Educause Conference in Anaheim, California.
http://www.educause.edu/E2010/Program/PS043

There is a place to comment on the presentation at the Educause website for those who wish to do so.

I think if people look more closely at the best practices they will hopefully have a better understanding of the rules and why they are useful.
http://html.cita.illinois.edu

The more I listen to people about their evaluation practices it is clear to me there is no common concept of "accessible design", there seems to be a lot of different opinions on what parts of WCAG 2.0 or Section 508 are more important to implement and what needs to be done to meet the requirement and even more important what is needed for functional accessibility and usability by people with disabilities . Some requirements like WCAG 2.0 1.2.3 "Audio Description or Media Alternative (Prerecorded, Level A)" and the corresponding Section 508 requirement 1194.24(d) "All training and informational video and multimedia productions which support the agency's mission, regardless of format, that contain visual information necessary for the comprehension of the content, shall be audio described" are ignored as far as I can tell.

I think it would help the web accessibility community if there is a more uniform understanding of what it means to design accessible web resources and to have a more common set of practices to give to web developers for accessible design and resources to perform accessibility quality assurance checks on their web resources.

I hope this discussion will eventually lead to a more fruit full discussion on accessible design and evaluation/QA best practices.

Jon