Accessibility of e-learning
In 2002 the Learning Development and Media Unit (of which I was Director) was faced with the need to make e-learning materials accessible to disabled students following the introduction of the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Act 2001. This act was in fact an amendment to the Disability Discrimination Act (1995), and designed to bring education within the remit of the DDA. I took this project personally under my wing, but despite the plethora of information I unearthed I was unable to locate much that was useful to me or my staff to guide us, in practical terms, in what we as multimedia developers should be doing to make our materials more accessible.
As a result, and after some consultation, I put forward a bid to the Higher Education Funding Council for England under its Improving Provision for Disabled Students initiative to create a practical resource that would be useful to developers. But although the Learning Development & Media Unit had a great deal of expertise in the production of e-learning materials it had little experience in accessibility. I therefore located a partner for the bid, the Digital Media Access Group (DMAG) at the University of Dundee. The combination of my unit’s multimedia production expertise with DMAG’s accessibility credentials, together with a well thought through bid, ensured we were successful in attracting £150k funding for a two year project. The project was called ‘Skills for Access: The Comprehensive Guide to Creating Multimedia for e-learning’. Sheffield was the lead institution with me as overall project manager, with variously five to seven staff working on the project split between Dundee and Sheffield.
The project was successfully completed in May 2005 with the launch of a open web site - http://www.skillsforaccess.org.uk/ The web site has been widely acknowledged for the contribution it has made to e-learning accessibility, and I and colleagues were invited to write and present extensively on the project (see Publications and Conference Presentations). On the basis of the experience gained my unit was able to produce a meaningful and practical accessibility policy for its production work as well as becoming a source of expertise for the university as a whole.