Creating accessible e-learning resources for disabled students.

2. The limitations of automated authoring tools.

There may be an assumption that popular web site creation software, or e-learning resource authoring tools provided by an institution’s VLE, will automatically create fully accessible resources.

Web content authoring tools, including those provided by popularly used VLEs, and tools to convert documents in other formats to HTML format, make it easy for someone without detailed technical skills to create and publish electronic information and resources.

The drawback is that most do not yet fully conform to W3C guidelines for ensuring that authoring tools promote the creation of accessible web content (the W3C Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG), are available at http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-AUTOOLS/). Authoring tools may create code that contains accessibility problems, or fails to validate to accepted standards, or to prompt authors to add specific features that are required to promote accessibility.

Meeting these shortcomings requires two strategies:

• authors need to validate the HTML code automatically produced by an authoring tool, amending as far as possible any problems reported by the validation tool;
• human judgement and intervention is needed to ensure that accessibility features have not been forgotten – evaluating the resource under different browsing conditions and, if at all possible, asking people with a variety of impairments to provide feedback about the resource.

The use of templates can help to reduce the burden of authoring pages, so long as the templates provided have themselves been developed with accessibility in mind.

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