Serendipity35

According to the U. S. Census Bureau over 54 million Americans have disabilities. We are talking here about people who have (even if it's for a limited amount of time) mobility, emotional, learning, visual, aural or cognitive disabilities. Plus, add in that this may be due to illness, aging, surgery, stress, trauma or grief. Look at it this way and you realize that there are pretty good odds that you will experience this in your lifetime.

So, in designing courses and the materials that you will use in a course, you should strive to create physical environments and systems that are usable by everyone. My attitude is that we all have different abilities and disabilities, though some of us have much more serious disabilities, and we should be designing with that in mind.

For the EdTech crowd, the focus is often on designing websites (including course management systems). This is sometimes called web accessibility. Accessibility is a general term used to describe the degree to which a system is usable by as many people as possible without modification. That makes it sound like usability - but usability deals with how easily a thing can be used by any type of user. We also have the term "universal design" to further confuse all of this.

Recommendations for accessible web development were introduced in 1997 by the W3C and Federal legislation in the U.S., particularly Section 508 of Public Law 99-506 and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

If you're new to these ideas, here are some links that can help you get started:

1. The World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
2. Here's an informative article on Universal Design for Instruction
3. 
   W3Schools has some good Web-building tutorials (from basic HTML and XHTML to advanced XML, SQL, Database & WAP
4. Universal Design for Learning Project
5. Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) CAST is a not-for-profit education research and development organization that uses technology to make education more flexible and accessible for all students, especially those with disabilities.
6. Fast Facts for Faculty is a starter site at Ohio State University
7. ALLTech is a center that provides training, consultations, and technical assistance in the areas of assistive technology, specialized software, Web accessibility, and universal design in education.

If you want to see how this plays out beyond education, try The Center for Universal Design, a national research, information, and technical assistance center that evaluates, develops, and promotes universal design in housing, public and commercial facilities, and related products.