ANNOUNCEMENT: On-line Course on Universal Design of Web

I teach an on-line course "Designing Universally Accessible
Web Resources" for improving the accessibility of web
resources to people with disabilities.  I would appreciate if
you could pass this information on to people or other e-mail
list serves for web developers who might be interesed in the
course.  The course starts on February 14th.

Thanks, Jon

More information can be found at:
http://cita.rehab.uiuc.edu/courses/2006-02-REHAB711NC/

Registration Information
http://cita.rehab.uiuc.edu/courses/2006-02-REHAB711NC/reg.php

Course Overview
Universal design focuses on making web resources compatible
with the widest range of web browsing technologies which can
also easily adapt to the needs and capabilities of users
through the use of web standards. Web standards are all about
the concept of "interoperability", the ability of people to
access and exchange information on a wide range of computing
technologies and operating systems. The use of universal
design principles makes web resources more accessible to
people with disabilities, which results in all users having
more choices and control over how they view and use web
resources. Users with visual impairments can easily increase
font size using the text scaling features of browsers. People
who want to view two different web pages side by side can
change the widow width of their browser and content re-flows
to fit the size of the window. A PDA user can apply a user
style sheet to view only the headings of a web page to get an
overview of the topics, without having to do endless scrolling
through text on a small screen.

Course Outline
 * Alternative views of the web
 * Web Standards
 * Web accessibility standards
 * Design vs. repair for accessibility
 * Creating Structure and Layout
 * Using Cascading Style Sheets
 * Scripting alternatives for styling
 * Multi-Media
 * MS Office, PDF and Flash

Who Should Take This Course?

This course is designed for web content developers to learn
about the disability access issues faced by people with
disabilities in using the web and how web resources can be
designed to improve accessibility. The course provides a
foundation on how people with disabilities access information
on the web using mainstream browsers and specialized assistive
technologies like speech renderings. Participants will learn
about the two main standards for web accessibility, the W3C
Web Content Accessibility Standards and the Section 508
requirements for web materials. The strengths and weaknesses
of different evaluation and repair tools will be presented to
help participants understand how to use the available tools to
evaluate and repair their web resources. Participants will
learn about common HTML accessibility problems, and HTML and
CSS techniques that can be used to improve accessibility.
Captioning of multimedia materials is also covered for
Microsoft Media Player, Real Player and Quicktime, and the
accessibility of non-W3C technologies like PDF and Flash will
also be discussed.


Jon Gunderson, Ph.D., ATP
Director of IT Accessibility Services
Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services (CITES)
and 
Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology
Disability Resources and Education Services (DRES)

Voice: (217) 244-5870
Fax: (217) 333-0248
Cell: (217) 714-6313

E-mail: jongund@uiuc.edu

WWW: http://cita.rehab.uiuc.edu/
WWW: https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/jongund/www/

Received on Friday, 27 January 2006 20:39:17 UTC