courseware accessibility

Hi,

I am doing a bit of research on the state of accessibility in e-learning
courseware.  I've been told by someone on another list that the days of
centralized courseware are counted and that the future lies in Service
Oriented Architectures for éducation (for example, see ELF[1]), based on Web
services, thus a assemblage of independent components that communicate
together with the help of standards developed by IMS, IEEE, ISO, OASIS, etc.
That this corresponds more to the needs of organisations that already have
certain services set up and only wish to have a few services offered by a
LMS and that this displaces the accessibility problem from centralized LMS
towards the various components that are chosen.

I am curious to know what effect this may have on accessibility.  To my
mind, it sounds promising as long as there are components available that
take into account accessibility standards (I imagine that in certain
countries, like the USA, this is less problematic as standards are
compulsory but in my part of the world, much of what is being developed here
still fails to take this into consideration).  Also, I would like to know
how most courseware is fairing accessibility-wise as there are still a lot
of organisations using them.  Besides A-Tutor, where accessibility is a
major concern, how are the others doing ?

Any thoughts or info would be greatly appreciated.


Catherine
--

[1] http://www.elframework.org/ 


___________________________

Catherine Roy
www.w3qc.org 
www.communautique.qc.ca 
http://perso.b2b2c.ca/zara/ 
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Received on Wednesday, 5 January 2005 22:43:51 UTC