The need for electronic resources to be accessible to all users has become a major issue for all who publish. For corporates, the commercial logic of not discriminating against minority users is highly persuasive, and for all those involved in education, training and associated publishing, legislation such as the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001 in the UK have greatly increased the pressure to comply for commercial, competitive, PR and legal reasons.
Although there is a lack of clear legal precedent for precisely what constitutes compliance with the relevant legislation, the consensus of writers on the subject agree that conformance to the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) Level AAA guidelines would put a publisher well beyond issue regarding accessibility.
Creating new content which complies to Level AAA is relatively straightforward, although large pieces of work can still require considerable processing and manaul intervention if authors and editors are unfamiliar with the technical details.
Converting old content can range from the trivial to the extremely arduous, and this depends very much on the nature of the content to be converted and the format in which it was created and stored. It is here that City Mutual Consulting finds most of its advisory work.
All of CM's products are available in VLE compatible versions. All truly SCORM 1.2- or LRN 3.0-compliant platforms can host our resources, and Blackboard and WebCT licencees may download versions which import seamlessly to their native environment.
If you are interested in using our expertise in VLE standards to either author new, compliant material or convert existing resources, please contact our consultancy arm. With experience in dealing with not only our own, vast resources, but also those of some major academic publishers and universities, City Mutual Consulting is the partner of choice in VLE and accessibility conversion.