Examination of the Protection Offered by Current Accessibility Acts and Guidelines to People with Disabilities in Using Information Technology Devices

Today, information technology (IT) products are extensively used in everyday life; however, disabled people still experience difficulties in using them. To ensure the equal use of IT products by people with disabilities, various laws/guidelines/standards have been established. In particular, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, 21st-Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, the European Accessibility Act, and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines strongly influence IT product sales and, hence, have been included in the scope of this research. This study analyzed the main accessibility provisions/guidelines from the user experience (UX) perspective and the IT device difficulties that are addressed by the provisions/guidelines. Accordingly, the study used the IT interaction disability concept, which analyzes the comprehensive difficulties associated with the use of an IT device from the perspective of interaction, to map each task–user interface–context factor. Finally, this study suggests the aspects to be considered while establishing accessibility provisions/guidelines. Moreover, it clarifies the provisions and guidelines for IT product designers and developers by analyzing them from the UX perspective.

Using Video in Blended Pedagogies to Address Accessibility

Besides being the right thing to do, creating an accessible learning experience ensures that educational institutions are providing equitable opportunities for the many students with a disability. Millions of people live with disabilities, not all of them easily visible. Video has become a major component of the digital workplace, and offers some challenges to some people with disabilities. But not only are there ways to overcome these challenges, video itself can aid in providing an effective learning experience for all students. The most common topic to come up for increasing video accessibility is around captions and transcripts. Video unites sight and sound. Especially in an education environment, removing the sound usually makes a video mostly pointless. It’s not enough for the content to be accessible, though. The video platform itself has to be accessible if you genuinely want to increase accessibility.The key to increasing accessibility is flexibility. If you can offer students multiple choices – with captions or without, with default-size icons or with larger and higher contrast icons, live or on-demand, in person or remote – they can choose for themselves the accommodations they need to do their best work. Many students have disabilities they may not wish to disclose. The way one person is affected by a disability may be different from how another person with a similar disability is affected. In fact, a person may feel impacted by their disability in different ways from day to day, such as when someone with chronic pain has a “good” or a “bad” day. In this brief presentation, Grant Beevers, Senior Digital Learning Specialist with Kaltura, will outline how organisations can address accessibility through best practice in video design and publishing, whether it’s embedded video content in course design, content imported from external websites, and common use cases including personal and lecture capture.

Accessible Media: The Need to Prepare Students for Creating Accessible Content

Electronic media accessibility has come a long way since the Telecommunications Act of 1996. In 2010, the Communication and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) mandated closed captioning many online videos and called for making video blind accessible through audio descriptions. The Department of Justice (DOJ) ruled Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) applied to the virtual world. Since January 2015, there have been over 240 online-accessibility lawsuits. As educators, we need to prepare students to understand what accessibility is and how to make electronic media accessible. This article outlines accessibility issues across the curriculum, including closed captioning, audio descriptions, and online documents, and calls for better integration of accessibility into the electronic media curriculum.