AccessComputing

ITTATC (Information Technology Technical Assistance and Training Center) and AccessIT (the National Center on Accessible Information Technology in Education) were both funded to promote the use of electronic and information technology that is accessible to people with disabilities nationwide. Outreach efforts of ITTATC focused on industry, state government, and consumers, whereas AccessIT reached out primarily to educational entities at all academic levels.

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 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.

Background

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.

As increasing numbers of people with disabilities pursue educational opportunities that require computer use, accessibility of computing facilities becomes even more critical. Making a computer lab accessible requires that attention be devoted to the physical accessibility of the lab facility, as well as to the accessibility of the available technology. Assistive technology (AT) should be available for students who need it. However, AT alone does not make a computer lab accessible.

You can find lists of resources on the World Wide Web. Here are some good places to start:

The term digital divide refers to the gap that exists between those who have and those who do not have access to technology. The term gained popularity in the late 1990s, fueled in part by a series of reports from the U.S. Department of Commerce National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The first of these reports, Falling Through The Net: A Survey of the "Have Nots" in Rural and Urban America, was released in July 1995.

In order for assistive technologies (AT) to convey meaningful information to users about an application's user interface, the AT first must be able to access that information from the application. Microsoft's solution to this problem is Microsoft® Active Accessibility® (MSAA), which has been available as an add-on since Windows® 95 and built into subsequent Windows® releases. MSAA is a technology that provides a standard, consistent mechanism for exchanging information between applications and assistive technologies.