Title: Guidelines for Accessible Delivery of Text, Audio, Images, and Multimedia
Course: Globalization (Test Module) > Section: Universal Design for Learning

Every person learns differently and  online learning allows each user to interact with lesson material in his or her preferred way, relying on their individual strengths while discounting as much as possible their weaknesses. The principles of excellent software design call on developers to work in full knowledge of the range of human skills and limitations. Software designers of teaching materials and activities, in particular, must strive to achieve this high standard.

When a user has a disability, access to learning software may depend entirely on how flexibly that product can deliver its content. Some users may need only to modify the parameters in which media is presented; other users may require entirely different media. Developers who achieve the kind of flexibility that diversity requires will enhance the accessibility of their product.

At a minimum, developers should provide text representations for all media types. This baseline will help address access for many users. That said, it should be noted that users with learning disabilities benefit from graphical presentations. For this reason, the practice of providing text-only content as an alternative to inaccessible multimedia content may not be an effective solution for users with cognitive disabilities.

A number of resources that address flexible media delivery are currently available. The W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative provides accessibility guidelines for W3C technologies such as HTML, XML, SMIL, CSS & SVG. It also provides more general guidelines for web content accessibility, authoring tool accessibility, and user agent accessibility. More information links are available in the Appendix. Two other comprehensive guides are referenced here.