An update, post-Accessing Higher Ground

Hi, and welcome to new members who joined us after learning about the group at the Accessing Higher Ground 2017 conference! This short post reviews our time at the conference and outlines next steps for the group.

Our conference session gave some background to this group’s creation and motives—our focus on supporting W3C accessibility initiatives by providing insight to the needs of people working with online learning, in particular identifying where and how more information applicable to online learning could be provided on the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) web site. A session abstract and a link to slides is available.

We were delighted that several people joined the group straight after the session, and we look forward to working with you!

During AHG, we also had the opportunity to have a very good constructive chat with Sharron Rush, one of the co-chairs of the Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG), the group leading the redesign of the WAI Web site. They plan to launch a new site early in 2018, and we have a window of opportunity to influence the new site before the launch. AccessLearn will need to work closely with EOWG on providing clear, prioritized recommendations, and a plan for creating the recommended new content.

We’re pleased that so many group members have provided feedback on our list of recommended actions for plugging content gaps. Our next step is to finalise this prioritization as soon as possible, so that EOWG has a clear message of what content we think should be included and how it should be provided.

Then, we plan to define how that content will be written. In some cases, EOWG may be able to do it; in other cases they will look to us as subject matter experts. So, while you review and indicate your priority for each recommendation, please consider whether you would be willing to be involved in authoring or reviewing the content associated with the recommendation. Thank you!

We’ll continue discussions through the group email list; we also have the opportunity of having a group teleconference if necessary.