It is unlikely that electronic resources in educational institutions, libraries, and other organizations will be accessible to students and employees with disabilities without the establishment of specific policies and/or procedures. As technology applications become ubiquitous and multimedia is the norm, an ad hoc approach to accessibility becomes increasingly less effective.
Not yet, but it is only a matter of time. Although it is always hard to know with certainty what the results might be in a particular court case, it is well established that when a court is asked to decide a new issue, for example, obligations to provide accessible websites, it will look to earlier cases that have raised similar issues.
Since 1997, Education Week has published an annual fifty-state report on how U.S. middle and high schools are utilizing technology. The free online report, Technology Counts, provides extensive summary information and state-by-state data about level of access to technology, capacity to use technology, and actual use of technology.
For individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing, telephone communication involves communicating by text rather than by voice, typically using a teletypewriter (TTY), also known as a TDD (Telecommunications Device for the Deaf). A basic TTY consists of a keyboard, a display screen, and a modem, which operates over standard telephone lines. If a deaf individual is communicating with another TTY user, both users send and receive text. If a deaf individual is communicating with a hearing individual who doesn't have a TTY, they will use the Telecommunication Relay Service (TRS).
The National Council on Disability (NCD) is an independent federal agency making recommendations to the President and Congress on issues affecting Americans with disabilities. NCD is comprised of a team of fifteen Presidential appointees, an Executive Director appointed by the Chairman, and twelve, full-time professional staff.
Assistive technology is technology used by individuals with disabilities in order to perform functions that might otherwise be difficult or impossible. Assistive technology can include mobility devices such as walkers and wheelchairs, as well as hardware, software, and peripherals that assist people with disabilities in accessing computers or other information technologies.
The Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996, also known as the Information Technology Management Reform Act, established a definition of information technology that has subsequently been cited by numerous other federal laws.
The University of Wisconsin–Madison was one of the first universities to develop a web accessibility policy. Its development was an effort to make the web more accessible for people with vision, hearing, and other disabilities. The original policy, enacted in December of 2000, was based on the guidelines developed by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI™) of the World Wide Web Consortium.
My name is Sheryl Burgstahler, and I work at the University of Washington in Seattle. I wanted to develop an Internet-based course offered through the Department of Education and the Department of Rehabilitative Medicine. I wanted to coteach the course with a colleague who is blind and who was a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. I wanted to know how we could efficiently collaborate and share the workload. We had delivered similar content many times in on-site courses and presentations.
Multimedia presentations can enrich education and enhance learning for many students, but it can also pose barriers for others. Audio and video are inaccessible to people who are unable to hear, and video is inaccessible to people who are unable to see critical information that is presented visually. Other students are impacted by low bandwidth Internet connections. Multimedia players can pose barriers as well if the player controls require use of a mouse or if they are not labeled sufficiently to be usable by screen reader users.