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Web Accessibility Course

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From: Katherine Mancuso
Date: Mar 8, 2011 5:21PM

Actually, I used to work at the office that produced this course, and
have had a look at it. However, I would LOVE to hear reviews from
actual students, as I suspect all the staff would.

The authors are the real deal as far as web accessibility & online
education - and I'm not just saying that because I worked there - and
I can guarantee that the information is solid and fairly current (it
was just updated to reflect WCAG 2.0 about 8 months ago). The folks
there are also likely to be quite responsive to suggestions for
improvements to the course, and they have produced other online
educational courses. When this course was initially produced they
were very active in the W3C-WAI and other standards efforts and in
studying best practices for online education; their research is now
focused on science education for people with disabilities & virtual
worlds, but they definitely have real technical competency in
accessibility and produce lots of accessible educational websites.
The office is also fully integrated into a rehabilitation research
place, which means that they have a really good perspective on actual
disabled people and how they use the web and on doing user testing.

That said, I would not plan to use this course on its own if you're in
fact needing to do developer EVANGELISM (that is, a sales job on the
value of accessibility) rather than straight education. Also, if you
need specialized topics such as Flash accessibility, I would recommend
supplementing the course with other resources. Remember that all
accessibility will be somewhat technology-specific - so if you use a
Java framework, you may need to introduce a toolkit for that to your
developers; if you're using a CMS like Drupal there are specific
strategies.

The $99 cost of the course is partially because they award
certification & CEUs through Georgia Tech's Continuing Ed, and the
reason that they do this is that people who are certified assistive
tech professionals can use it for certification. However, you should
remember that the certificate is nice and you may add it to your
resume, but in fact certifications don't really mean anything in web
accessibility (this is a caveat in case you have certifications in
security, compliance, or other fields where they do matter and are
approaching this in the same way).

Katherine

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Katherine Mancuso

ISIS Inc, Community Manager (http://www.isis-inc.org)
Sex::Tech Conference, Social Media Chair (http://www.sextech.org)
The Vesuvius Group: metaverse community builders
(http://www.thevesuviusgroup.com)
GimpGirl Community Liaison (http://www.gimpgirl.com)

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