Internet Learning Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2014 | Page 19

Internet Learning
equal access for an individual with a disability
(Excelsior College, 2013).
In compliance with ADA mandates,
Excelsior has a system in place for students
with documented disabilities to receive accommodations
for their online courses.
This process is reactive in that students must
first request an accommodation, and then
the course is outfitted to meet their needs.
In 2012, the decision was made to go beyond
current federal laws and become more
proactive in the approach to serve both
students with documented disabilities and
those that would also benefit from ADA-accessible
course design principles, which is
the concept of universal design. Universal
design is a set of guidelines for the development
of educational materials that provides
all individuals, including those with disabilities
and those without, comparable access
to those educational materials (CAST,
2013). Individuals without documented
disabilities can also benefit from universal
design principles. For example, individuals
with learning preferences (i.e., auditory or
visual), environmental limitations (i.e., no
access to speakers or a headset to listen to a
lecture), and language barriers (i.e., English
as a Second Language) reap benefits from
universal design.
Excelsior College is pursuing institution-level
recognition by Quality Matters
and is currently in the second year of
a three-year implementation plan. Accessibility
is one of the eight General Standards
of the Quality Matters Rubric (Quality
Matters, 2011); thus certain criteria must
be met in order to meet Quality Matters
standards.
Accessibility Project Overview
The first two years of Excelsior’s accessibility
project have included creating a standards
list, editing cascading style sheets
(CSS) and Dreamweaver templates to meet
accessibility standards, implementing a
process to bring online courses in accordance
to the developed standards list, and
editing roughly 208 courses to comply with
the developed standards list. A contractor
was hired to assist in all areas of the project,
but mostly for the purpose of serving
as a co-subject matter expert and completing
the bulk of the actual course edits. After
developing a standards list customized for
our courses (see Table 1), we edited institutional-level
online course Dreamweaver
templates and CSS for compliance with the
standards list. The creation and implementation
of the course revision process (see
Figure 1) began once the standards list,
templates, and CSS files were created and
edited.
Developing an Instructional Accessibility
Standards List
The first step in the project was to work collaboratively
with the contractor to develop
a standards list based on Section 508 standards
(Rehabilitation Act, 1998), WCAG
1.0 Priority guidelines (W3C, 1999a), the
design of and elements in Excelsior’s online
courses, and our specific student population.
WCAG 1.0 includes three Priority
levels, Priority 1 containing standards that
content developers “must satisfy” (W3C,
1999b). Excelsior, serving mostly nontraditional
adult learners, has a unique student
population that would benefit from
certain accessibility standards/universal
design principles beyond WCAG 1.0 Priority
1 guidelines, so Priorities 2 and 3 were
also considered when developing the customized
standards list. For example, standards
were added from Priorities 2 and 3,
which address elements such as page orga-
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