Recommended Sites for Instructors of Online Courses

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (§504) prohibit discrimination against individuals with disabilities and require postsecondary institutions to effectively communicate website content to individuals with disabilities. Although the legal implications are unclear, mandates for levels of compliance are anticipated so that course sites are authored to maximize access opportunities for persons with disabilities. The following websites are recommended to provide instructors of online courses with information regarding web accessibility issues.

http://www.blackboard.com/products/access/index.htm
Blackboard accessibility issues

http://www.w3.org/WAI
A comprehensive set of guidelines for meeting the Web access needs of persons with disabilities have been developed by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) as a working group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These guidelines address barriers in Web pages which people with physical, visual, hearing, and cognitive/neurological disabilities may encounter. Common accessibility problems on Web sites include: images without alternative text; lack of alternative text for image map hot-spots; misleading use of structural elements on pages; uncaptioned audio or undescribed video; lack of alternative information for users who cannot access frames or scripts; tables that are difficult to decipher when linearized; or sites with poor color contrast.

http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/ada/websites2.htm
Accessibility of State and Local Government Websites to People with Disabilities by the U.S. Department of Justice

http://www.ada.gov
This is the U.S. Department of Justice Americans with Disabilities homepage

http://www.cynthiasays.com
Cynthia is a web content accessibility validation solution; it is designed to identify errors in design related to Section 508 standards and the WCAG guidelines. The main purpose of this portal is to educate web site developers in the development Web Based content that is accessible to all.

http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/index.jsp
This free service will allow you to test web pages and help expose and repair barriers to accessibility and encourage compliance with existing accessibility guidelines, such as Section 508 and the W3C's WCAG.