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Re: Question about lynda.com

for

From: Jennifer Sutton
Date: Jul 6, 2014 12:01PM

Greg and others on WebAIM interested in mainstream online course
sites like this one:

I, for one, would not pay for a Linda.com course/subscription without
at least one person I trust telling me whether it'd be accessible to
me, using a screen reader. If I were you, Greg, I'd focus my
attention first on the resources a number of us have posted to the
list for you. But maybe you already have.

That being said, if you do take a course, please let us know how it
goes, accessibility-wise, from the student perspective.

As a result of my not knowing whether the courses are accessible, I
can't give you a recommendation about the quality of the content. I'd
hope it'd be good.

I do know that at least *some* of the courses have captions, but I
don't know whether that is flagged prior to registration.

For a variety of reasons, I've happened to be looking at this site,
recently, and I didn't find it easy to identify the courses focused
on accessibility. The word "access" comes up often (amidst the
initial some 20,000 results), but some of that may be related, for
example,to Microsoft Access.

Here are a few courses I identified (with instructor names I
recognize), for those who may be interested. This comes from a search
I did at the end of May; there may be more by now, and others may be
in the pipeline:

* Creating Accessible PDFs, by Chad Chelius
* Improving SEO Using Accessibility Techniques, by Morten Rand-Hendriksen
* Web Accessibility Principles, by Zoe Gillenwater


It'd be great if the site would improve its search capability,
although perhaps it does, for subscribers. I'm not saying that I
think accessibility should always and everywhere be a separate topic;
in fact, I don't. I think it should be integrated into all courses
where it's relevant. But it'd be helpful if they started flagging,
via their Metadata, when accessibility is covered as a part of the
course. Or maybe they could display groups of courses that "go
together." Again, maybe they already do.

Best,
Jennifer