As we work on the development of the Summer Session courses and start migrating our courses to the new Learning Management System, we are taking advantage of these changes to improve our course accessibility and usability. We are focusing our efforts on the Summer Session course GRMN 3505 The Enlightenment, and then will take what we learn to develop a process that will be applied to other courses.
So, what is accessibility? Web accessibility means people with disabilities, including visual, auditory, speech, physical, learning, cognitive and neurological disabilities, can use the Web. With our courses, if a page has poor accessibility, people with disabilities might not have the same same learning experience as their classmates.
Along with improving accessibility, we are also looking at improving our course usability. Accessibility and usability have things in common, but are not the same. Usability is designing pages to be more effective and efficient for everybody. If a web page is more accessible, it also usually improves its usability which can improve how a page is viewed by people who use devices with small screens, slower or older devices or computers, or who have language fluency or literacy issues.
As we work through the accessibility and usability process we will post the steps we take and our progress. We will also share our successes, challenges and the lessons we learn along with interesting and helpful resources.
