There are a number of tools available to assist the teacher/designer in assessing the compliance of online teaching materials with Priority Levels 1, 2 and 3 of the W3C Guidelines. It is also important however, that features associated with the design of online courseware as opposed to general web pages are checked to ensure that courses are meeting the needs of most students. It is important to reiterate that a course designer is not expected to meet the needs of every student all of the time, but that best efforts are made to be inclusive, and that alternative arrangements can be made for those whom it is not possible to accommodate.

Use the Available Checking Tools

Bobby 3.2 from CAST is a web page checker that will assess and report on the compliance of your course with the functional aspects of the W3C standards. This is however, a fairly crude measure and it will not give advice on aspects of design and presentation. Also, it should be noted that it is not possible to test a WebCT course online, so this option is only available to those developing standard web pages. Single pages can be reviewed online at the Bobby web site http://www.cast.org/bobby/, simply by typing in the URL of the page you wish to check.

Figure 8: The Bobby web page checker with a report on the W3.org web-site

A better alternative is to download Bobby to test batches of pages as they are developed. Again the checking procedure is a simple process of typing in the URL. The check will produce a brief report of the functional aspects of the site, and a summary of the features that need to be checked but can not be assessed by the tool.

If the authoring environment Dreamweaver is used for course development, a better option is to use the facility within that package to perform a check on pages as they are created. This produces a report which is similar to the Bobby test. The accessibility checker is included in Version 4 and above of Dreamweaver. For earlier versions of Dreamweaver, the download is available from the WebCT resources page on the EDTeC web site (http://www.edtec.unsw.edu.au/services) (Getting Your Course Online).

To check pages in Dreamweaver:

• Click on the Commands menu.
• Select Check Page for Accessibility. Dreamweaver will perform an accessibility check on your documents related to Priority Levels 1, 2 and 3 of the W3C Guidelines and prepare a report to help meet any shortcomings.

Figure 9: Accessibility report for a document produced in Dreamweaver

Once again the EDTeC team can assist if with any difficulties or can offer advice with regard to accessibility checking.

Perform a Manual Check

The teacher/designer of an online course should perform usability checks before the course or resources are made available to students. Try turning off graphics to judge whether a student using a screen reader or text only browser will have a similar experience to any other student.

To turn off graphics:

• In Internet Explorer, Tools - Options - Advanced tab - Multimedia - uncheck show pictures. Apply.
• Click the Refresh icon on your browser window.

Refer to EDTeC's Quality Teaching and Learning Guidelines

A course that is intuitive to use, has clear navigation and structure, and where the learning objectives, methods and intended outcomes are clear, will be a well designed course for all students. EDTeC's Quality Teaching Principles and Guidelines (http://www.edtec.unsw.edu.au/) can provide more information and advice on achieving these goals.