After reading and going through the section in the toolkit named Web Accessibility I have a new appreciation for how sites and various software accomodate people with disabilities. I learned that there are Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Some of the disabilities range from blindness, deafness, dyslexia, colour blindness, hand tremors short term memory loss and cognitive disability. Such affordances that were available were screen reading software, braille printers, screen magnifiers, and single click mice.
I checked out the moodle in terms of 10 quick tips to provide to make it a Universal design- design for all.
The activity that was very useful was the Markup Validation Service. I put my moodle address in it and received back a document saying that it was successfully checked as XHTML 1.o Strict! It said that it performed a formal validation. They used OpenSSP and libxml2. A link was attached that said it could be attached to the site so I have done that. This is a great service as it can check for all the affordances quickly and in that way web designers will be able to properly evaluate the accessibility of their web site and its content. A great service. This was a worthwhile learning activity.
They make it relatively easy to audit one’s websites for accessiblity these days. And we’re moving towards tools that do this from within. All good to my mind.