Promoting Accessibility in Courses

From Education & Outreach

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We welcome your help encouraging everyone to include accessibility in their courses.
You are welcome to use the sample wording below for your own blog posts, newsletter articles, etc.
If you write a blog, newsletter article, or such, please let us know by sending e-mail to wai-eo-editors@w3.org and we'll add it to our list.


Resources & Pointers

Audience & Messages

Audience

We have identified two three main audience types. First is the general public which includes providers of informal meet-ups and continuing education of the kind that occurs at conferences and "unconferences." The second is the academic community. Messaging will overlap, but in some instances will be specific to one group or the other.

  • General Audience - may need foundational messaging about accessibility issues as well as specifics about the materials available. May not know much about how PWD use the web or the need for accessibility.
  • Professional Audience - May have strong understanding of one or two aspects of web accessibility, but requires focused training to meet the accessibility requirements of their job. This group includes advocates, managers, developers, graphic artists etc. Focus is on missing knowledge: accessibility techniques for web developers, technology issues for disability advocates, social responsibility and requirement issues for managers.
  • Academic Audience - should be more aware of need for educational inclusion. Messaging may be more focused on industry trends, skills development, creating technical graduates who are ready to meet requirements of the information technology industry.

Messages

An important aspect of high quality Web courses is making the Web accessible to people with disabilities. [or: An important aspect of high quality Web courses is including instruction on developing Web sites that are accessible to people with disabilities.] This principle applies whether the audience consists of web developers, graphic designers, managers, advocates or college students.

The Suite provides several presentation outlines that enable the presenter to address a variety of skill levels, interests and time constraints.

Tweet ideas you can use

...

Guidance for Developing Web #Accessibility Presentations and Training updated. Share your ideas. Links in: http://bit.ly/wat32 --#a11y w3C_wai tweet

Blog, newsletter, e-mail ideas you can use

Subject/Headline: W3C WAI materials to help you update your web course for accessibility

@@ students get current info, zingy @@
An important aspect of high quality Web courses is making the Web accessible to people with disabilities. [or: An important aspect of high quality Web courses is including instruction on developing Web sites that are accessible to people with disabilities.] To help you integrate accessibility in your Web courses, W3C WAI provides materials that you can use for lecture, activities, and student study. See Developing Web Accessibility Presentations and Training at http://www.w3.org/WAI/training/

@@ It's like open source courseware @@

Web accessibility is an important social, technical, and business issue.

Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web, and that they can contribute to the Web. Currently most Web sites and Web software have accessibility barriers that make it difficult or impossible for many people with disabilities to use the Web. Teaching Web designers, developers, and authors accessibility is a key factor in making Web sites and software accessible, so that people with disabilities can use and contribute to the Web more effectively.

@@consider integrating shorter in first bit @@
Web courses that are up-to-date with the latest trends in the industry include accessibility. Accessibility is being requested more and more in Web site development, as people realize the many benefits of making the Web accessible—for people with and without disabilities, and for Web site owners—and as legal requirements increase. Social, technical, financial, and legal factors of Web accessibility are described in the Web Accessibility Business Case at: http://www.w3.org/WAI/bcase/Overview.html

W3C WAI provides material to support Web accessibility. ...

You can use WAI material for your Web accessibility instruction.

To help you incorporate accessibility in your upcoming Web design and development courses, we put together a resource suite @@

* @@use it - make your students happy

We hope that you will @@bookmark "@@training resource suite" and come back to it as you prepare Web course syllabus and materials.

Thank you for your attention to Web accessibility.


@@ College Instructors of Web Technologies, User Interface Design or Human Factors@@

Do you want to integrate accessibility for people with disabilities into your core curriculum, but are not sure where to start? Consider using, Developing Web Accessibility Presentations and Training, a W3C publications. This resource provides several detailed presentation outlines. These can be used for a variety of audiences, skill levels and time constraints.

The outline, Web Accessibility Design, is an excellent one-week introduction to accessibility for students in computer science, information technology or human factors psychology. It can be presented in two lecture hours with an optional 2 to 3 hour lab. This resource comes with several suggested readings for the instructor's preparation. Many of these are excellent reading assignments for students. Web standards originate at the W3C, so many of the referenced documents are primary source materials.

Conference Presentation Possibilities

Overall Contacts for Promotion

  • Accessing Higher Ground in November in Colorado. Any more room? See if anyone we know has had a paper accepted who could mention the training suite. Howard Kramer and Glenda S. may have ideas. See Accessing Higher Ground - Accessible Media, Web and Technology ConferenceContact page -- November 12 - 16, 2012 (Note that Derek is keynoting; perhaps he might mention the training suite) (JS)
  • Maybe a CSUN presentation for 2013
  • AccessU for 2013 could do a "train the trainers" track and use the training suite (SR)
  • South by Southwest (SR)
  • South by Southwest Edu open for papers until the end of this year, helping K -- 12 teachers too, focuses on those who are making curriculum products (SR)
  • OZeWAI conference - annually in December
  • Meetups and unconferences for short workshops -- especially start with these two, at the general level (JS):



EOWG planning & record keeping

2017 thorough resource review

EOWG members involved

  • Vivienne Conway
  • Andrew Arch
  • Denis Boudreau

Github

2014 Notes

  • I do think that if we get a good set of resources on the WAI-Engage wiki, we could start some good conversations and begin to gather use cases (getting feedback from people about if/how they use the materials.) Training is a bleeding need for people these days. This may be a tangential consideration to the Tutorials work we do at the F2F. Sharron

2013 Done

Mailing lists

Misc

  • 2013-Feb-21 Tweet: Guidance for Developing Web #Accessibility Presentations and Training updated. Share your ideas. Links in: http://bit.ly/wat32 --#a11y w3C_wai tweet


2012 Notes

  • [done or to do?] UN Enable Newsletter (VMM)

Mailing lists:

To do:

Outcome of brainstorming of Outreach Subcommittee Meeting Aug 15, 2012 plus additions. Note that many of these ideas are U.S.-centric and we will ask EO for more global perspective

  • Finalize outreach plan and present to EO by Aug 24, 2012 (JS, WD, SR)
  • Glenda Sims -- any associations? Suggestions of newsletters or conferences? (SR)
  • Web Teacher -- Virginia DeBolt (SR)
  • 6-week course on building websites with WCAG 2.0 compliance Professional Certificate in Web Accessibility from Media Access Australia.
  • Terry Thompson
  • Sarah Bourne in MA for government curricula connections
  • CA system -- both UC and state (WD)
  • Ideas about TX systems? (SR)
  • Maybe set up an online one-hour seminar to go over how to use this training suite? Volunteer(s) to teach? How to arrange payments and assure platform accessibility?
  • Post announcement to both the ATHEN and AHEAD email Lists (JS)
  • Craft email message for the WAI-Engage email list encouraging discussion of the training suite on the WAI-Engage Wiki. Capture tips and tricks for conducting effective training sessions using the suite. (SR with help from EO)
  • Getting materials adopted into an official curriculum -- Wayne can offer guidance about that; what they did at Long Beach, integrated into learning materials and modules
  • Develop a press release draft related to Longbeach and saying: "Here is what they did at Long Beach, if you want to do the same, use these resources." (SR)
  • Norm Coombs and EASI
  • John Gunderson at U. of IL
Additional Ideas extracted/Copied from EO WG Promotion Wiki Pages
  • WSG Announcements (If you have an event, resource or relevant job you'd like posted (from any country), please let me know - russ at maxdesign.com.au)

Links for light reading Max Design / Russ Weakley - distributed through Web Standards Group

form to Suggest a Link]

Higher Education Web Professionals Association (HighEdWeb)]

Old and related material


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