White paper
Accessibility: a 'minorities' issue?
"The paper on accessibility was extremely
well written and it's nice to see a company looking deeply at the
issues."
University of Sussex
Accessibility and e-learning
The Internet is the fastest-adopted technology in history. It has
given hundreds of millions of people knowledge, services and learning
they would have found difficult or impossible to access by other
means. And what is the primary reason for this phenomenal success?
Why did it reach critical mass so much more quickly than railways
or electricity? The answer lies in its universal access, literally
access at home, work, school, college, university, library, internet
café, to a computer with an internet connection.
However, there’s another narrower sense of ‘accessibility’
to do, not with technical access, but the limitation of the user
in terms of cognitive, visual, hearing or physical capability.
This type of accessibility is an issue that is easily caricatured
as political correctness, applying to a tiny minority of the population.
The truth is somewhat different. According to W3C, the governing
body for the World Wide Web, the proportion of people with disabilities
can range up to 20 per cent in some populations. A significant portion
of those people with disabilities, in some countries as many as
8% to 10% of the overall population, can benefit from e-learning
conforming to recommended standards.
This paper, originally released in in May 2002, has been updated
to reflect the recent increase in awareness of accessibility issues.
White Paper: Accessibility and e-learning
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