Purpose of the Guidelines

The aim of these guidelines is to assist the WebCT designer or web based course developer in complying with Priority One of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Standards (http://www.w3.org/WAI/) and to meet learner centred design principles to make courses inclusive and accessible to people with disabilities. Priority One means that the designer is satisfying the basic requirements for access to web documents. Also, the Disability Discrimination Act requires Higher Education institutions to employ inclusive practices to students with disabilities. These guidelines are intended to assist teaching staff in meeting those requirements.

There are general guidelines already in existence for the design of accessible web pages and for meeting the technology needs for students with disabilities (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0; "Web Bobby 3.2.1"; Assistive Technology: Meeting The Needs of Students with Disabilities in Post-Secondary Education"). The guidelines presented here are specifically tailored to address learner-centred design of online courseware for academic designers who are users of technology.

A number of principles concerned with the design of courses in WebCT need to be addressed in order to meet with accessibility guidelines. In addition there are evaluation methods and tools that can be used to assist in the design of accessible online learning environments.

Section One of this document presents the guidelines, with an explanation of the relevance of each point to people with disabilities, and suggested solutions. A reference to the appropriate W3C checkpoint is included for each of the guidelines. Section Two provides some general resources for assisting teachers/designers in the development of accessible courses.

Design Tools

The web-authoring tool, Dreamweaver is widely available across the University and used in conjunction with WebCT, or as a tool for making web pages for student resources and learning. Tips for applying features in that package are included where appropriate. There are also tips and references for HTML and a set of links to useful information and resources.