I did a presentation today for the Office of Distance Education and Learning Technologies at TAMU-CC. We had a pool about how many folks would show, I had opted for a dozen. Wrong by an order of 3. The room was full, and there was a representative from every college on campus. It was a fun session and allowed me to test out the December OCR findings against the two Ohio Universities.
Here and on Slideshare, are the slides for the session
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Thursday, February 12, 2015
Harvard and MIT are sued because their MOOCs are not accessible
It was going to happen, the question was when?
National Federation for the Blind,(NFB) in conjunction with some other advocacy groups has gone after the MOOCs.
"Much of Harvard's online content is either not captioned or is inaccurately or unintelligible captioned, making it inaccessible for individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing." the complaint says.
A spokes person for Harvard says that Harvard expected the Department of Justice (DoJ) to provide "much needed guidance" on the issue this year. I think that's initial excuse for why they aren't yet in compliance. I don't know if he realizes that this case will become the "much needed guidance."
I expect DoJ will join with NFB on this.
This will be fun to watch.
I think the suit is using ADA because many of the courses don't carry credit and are outside an education program, so may not be covered by Section 504. Dealing with this as an ADA issue also brings in DoJ and they have bigger sticks than OCR would under Section 504.
NFB has won suits against Netflix to require captioning of all videos in their service. They also won on accessibility of H&R Block's website. And of course, they won against Penn State. I don't think they'll loose this.
Links to news coverage:
New York Times
PR Newswire from National Federation of the Deaf -- one of the other complainants.
Reuters
National Federation for the Blind,(NFB) in conjunction with some other advocacy groups has gone after the MOOCs.
"Much of Harvard's online content is either not captioned or is inaccurately or unintelligible captioned, making it inaccessible for individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing." the complaint says.
A spokes person for Harvard says that Harvard expected the Department of Justice (DoJ) to provide "much needed guidance" on the issue this year. I think that's initial excuse for why they aren't yet in compliance. I don't know if he realizes that this case will become the "much needed guidance."
I expect DoJ will join with NFB on this.
This will be fun to watch.
I think the suit is using ADA because many of the courses don't carry credit and are outside an education program, so may not be covered by Section 504. Dealing with this as an ADA issue also brings in DoJ and they have bigger sticks than OCR would under Section 504.
NFB has won suits against Netflix to require captioning of all videos in their service. They also won on accessibility of H&R Block's website. And of course, they won against Penn State. I don't think they'll loose this.
Links to news coverage:
New York Times
PR Newswire from National Federation of the Deaf -- one of the other complainants.
Reuters
Monday, February 09, 2015
If You Are In the Area February 25th....
I'll be talking about access in online education at Texas A&M Corpus Christi. You've seen here the latest OCR actions, so I'm putting those together into a presentation, and testing it on February 25th.
If you're in the area, come by.
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