There are several things that professional organizations can do to increase the participation of people with disabilities in their field. Suggestions include:
Web accessibility is comprehensively covered by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in their Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which includes guidelines and checkpoints (called success criteria). There have been multiple revisions of WCAG. Most laws, policies, and legal settlements or resolutions identify either WCAG 2.1 or WCAG 2.0 Level AA as the standard by which accessibility is measured.
Multimedia presentations can be inaccessible to people who are unable to hear the audio content. The solution is to provide captions, a text version of the audio content that is synchronized with the multimedia presentation.
The technical standards and specifications for captioning video are well established and documented. For additional information relevant to online multimedia, consult the AccessIT Knowledge Base article What is the difference between SMIL and SAMI?
Although each situation is different and the student is the best source of information regarding useful accommodations, the following are some accommodations that should help to make the laboratory safer for students with mobility impairments and the other students in the class as well:
The knowledge, advice, and resources a mentor shares depend on the format and goals of a specific mentoring relationship. A mentor may share with a mentee (or protege) information about his or her own career path, as well as provide guidance, motivation, emotional support, and role modeling. A mentor may help with exploring careers, setting goals, developing contacts, and identifying resources. The mentor role may change as the needs of the mentee change.
Many distance learning courseware packages include a whiteboard tool. The purpose of an electronic whiteboard is the same as that of a blackboard or whiteboard in a school. Instructors and students write or draw on the board in order to share their ideas and to deliver instruction. Electronic whiteboards work as graphical chat tools. They allow multiple users to draw, paint, and share existing graphical files in real time. Unfortunately, exclusively graphical workspace is not accessible to users of screen readers.
In HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), the "longdesc" attribute was specifically designed to allow for long descriptions of complex images. This contrasts with the "alt" attribute, which describes relatively simple images using a minimal amount of text. The "longdesc" attribute allows authors to link to a separate page (for example, longdesc="https://www.washington.edu/accesscomputing/%3Ca%20href%3D"https://www.washington.edu/doit/img1description.html">https://www.washington.edu/doit/img1description.html") in which the image is described in detail.
There are a growing number of software products available that allow web developers to evaluate the accessibility of their web pages and sites. Many tools also prompt the developer to make specific repairs. The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) maintains an extensive list of such tools in their document Evaluation, Repair, and Transformation Tools for Web Content Accessibility.
