California State University - San Marcos  ADA Project Team

The Business Problem

California State University-San Marcos provides courses for over 6,000 students annually. Many of these courses are available to students through the Web. Currently CSUSM manages at least 200 Web based courses though its own Web servers. These courses and either fully or partially online or have supplemental Web based components.

In June of 2001, CSUSM adopted policies for Web site accessibility, to provide equal access to Web based material for students who were disabled. Through this policy, CSUSM Webmasters are advised to follow the standards of Section 508 of The Rehabilitation Act of 1998 and the web accessibility standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative. The policy further requires that online course material must follow accessibility standards. Please see: http://www.csusm.edu/accessibility/overview/interim_policy.html

In order to determine the “best practices” for creating accessible Web based courses, CSU San Marcos created a pilot program called ADAPT, which was funded by a grant from the State of California Lottery Program. According to Chuck Allen, Instructional Development Services Team Lead, “The mission of ADAPT is to create a working model for ensuring the accessibility of all online instruction offered by CSUSM.” The goal of this project is to create an infrastructure for how an accessibility-testing and remediation program for Web based course content could or ought to work. The pilot includes an analysis of eight Web based courses that have been created primarily through the use of Microsoft® FrontPage® and WebCT 6.1 SE. It will provide accessibility testing, recommendations on remediation and then actual remediation, conducted either by the project or by the content creators. The eight courses for the program were selected from a cross selection of different courses and instructors as well as diversity in components

“To implement our pilot we needed the ability to navigate through the complexities of Web based courses created as composites of different authoring tools. Most of the accessibility solutions that we tested only worked for Web sites, and many of them required us to enter a single page at a time,” said Adra Hallford, ADAPT Project Coordinator. “We needed a tool that could help us analyze the scope of the remediation required for each course. We needed a solution that would allow us to create concrete and usable data that would provide an analysis of the complexity of the course as well as providing usable feedback for the instructors, conducting remediation where necessary, and creating an audit trail of accessibility work.”

The Solution

The CSUSM ADAPT group purchased AccVerify and AccRepair. AccVerify provides for the verification of accessibility policy and standards required for Web Sites under the Rehabilitation Act Section 508 and W3C® Priority 1 guidelines. As information is added to a Web site, AccVerify reports on whether all elements are in compliance. AccRepair uses the reporting and verification components of AccVerify to launch a repair “wizard” interface, which prompts the user to correct accessibility errors. AccRepair also uses a library that “learns” as repairs are made. Corrections of the same error (for example, associating "alt-text" behind an image) need only be made once. The library then stores the corrected information and auto-corrects the images each time a page is encountered with that image. AccRepair and AccVerify are available as integrated Microsoft FrontPage applications. Both products are also available as automated server-based solutions that minimize labor required to achieve and maintain accessible Web sites as new content is created.

The ADAPT project is using AccVerify and AccRepair to both meet its project goals and to provide automated accessibility reports to content contributors for their Web sites. These solutions assist the ADAPT team in analyzing the courses that are included in the project, make a brief, usable initial report, introducing the instructor to what's been discovered and the potential remedies, allowing them to become more involved in the process if they wish, make changes to content, including file-type remediation, if necessary, and finally to assist the ADAPT team in creating a working model for a complete Web based course accessibility verification program that will be submitted for University funding next year.

“AccVerify/AccRepair software allows me to create a virtual space as a project allowing me greater accuracy to assess and remediate on a course-to-course basis”, said Jennifer Nowotny, Instructional Developer, ADAPT Program.

The Bottom Line

The pilot team has completed their analysis of six of the eight courses that were selected for review. The software testing and remediation solutions are allowing the project team to provide concrete feedback to their Web Course developers, and at the same time create an audit trail for the project- so that they will be able to show the benefit of their work for the next funding cycle. One of the unintended but unsurprising discoveries of the pilot program is that a lot of the accessibility improvements will also enhance the “usability” of the courses, thus improving the navigability and utility of the courses for all students! According to Gretchin Lair, Instructional Developer, “Sometimes the best way to make an online component meet ADA requirements is to reformat or substantially alter it, something an instructor wouldn't ordinarily take the time to do. One of the benefits of a project like this is that it gives instructors an opportunity to really evaluate how their online components contribute to their teaching objectives.”

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