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It amazes and shocks me that colleges still don't check the accessibility of their educational tools. Ever since the ADA and the Rehab Act of 1973 (Rehab Act on

It amazes and shocks me that colleges still don't check the accessibility of their educational tools. Ever since the ADA and the Rehab Act of 1973 (Rehab Act only applied to schools getting federal grants), schools have been required to provide students with disabilities with equal access. But there are still foul-ups all over the place. This reminds me of the Kindle debacle last year. Some universities provided Kindle DXs to students for course reading. Guess what? The text-to-speech feature is not enabled for all of the kindle books (copyright issues - a whole seperate story). The universities had to settle with the DOJ and DOE. Here's a legal opinion letter from the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights - http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/colleague-20100629.html http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/colleague-... (tl;dr: don't use inaccessible technologies for classroom learning). .

SoftwareMaven 16y ago
Having worked in the higher ed vertical, I've interacted with a lot of college IT groups. The clownish appearance of IT in higher education has much less to do with the people in the IT (though there is a higher-than-industry-standard proportion of those, there are also some of the most dedicated and smarted people I've had the privilege to work with) and much more to do with the structure of higher education in general. Every single major IT decision in a campus has to be sold to the faculty senate, which is the organization that really wields the power of the organization. Unfortunately, if you don't have IT management who are amazing sales people, you get decisions that are all about "will this make the grant I'm proposing tomorrow easier or harder". There are very few centralized IT projects, because it is such a nightmare to get approval across campus. Instead, every department solves the problems for themselves and expects IT to cobble everything together. And almost nobody gives a flying fart about the students and what they see of this mess. Given students today were born very shortly before the Internet went "mainstream" is a major issue and smart schools with strong central control (there are some...) are using it as a differentiator for student prospects.
- esoteriq 16y ago
  Thanks for that - I shouldn't have said that what I said about IT departments. You're right - there are a lot of external factors that comes into play whenever these types of decisions get made. I'm pretty sympathetic with the need to cut costs - hosting email gets expensive. I just hope that higher education pushes Google Apps and other education-based services to abide by Section 508 Accessibility Guidelines (and the guidelines are not even as sophisticated as they could be). You gotta start somewhere, yes?
burgerbrain 16y ago
What happens when a professor choses to teach with a text that doesnt have braille or electronic versions? This seems like just another case of people forbidding technology to compete on an even field.

SoftwareMaven 16y ago

Having worked in the higher ed vertical, I've interacted with a lot of college IT groups. The clownish appearance of IT in higher education has much less to do with the people in the IT (though there is a higher-than-industry-standard proportion of those, there are also some of the most dedicated and smarted people I've had the privilege to work with) and much more to do with the structure of higher education in general. Every single major IT decision in a campus has to be sold to the faculty senate, which is the organization that really wields the power of the organization. Unfortunately, if you don't have IT management who are amazing sales people, you get decisions that are all about "will this make the grant I'm proposing tomorrow easier or harder". There are very few centralized IT projects, because it is such a nightmare to get approval across campus. Instead, every department solves the problems for themselves and expects IT to cobble everything together. And almost nobody gives a flying fart about the students and what they see of this mess. Given students today were born very shortly before the Internet went "mainstream" is a major issue and smart schools with strong central control (there are some...) are using it as a differentiator for student prospects.

esoteriq 16y ago
Thanks for that - I shouldn't have said that what I said about IT departments. You're right - there are a lot of external factors that comes into play whenever these types of decisions get made. I'm pretty sympathetic with the need to cut costs - hosting email gets expensive. I just hope that higher education pushes Google Apps and other education-based services to abide by Section 508 Accessibility Guidelines (and the guidelines are not even as sophisticated as they could be). You gotta start somewhere, yes?

burgerbrain 16y ago

What happens when a professor choses to teach with a text that doesnt have braille or electronic versions? This seems like just another case of people forbidding technology to compete on an even field.