Advice on Non-HTML Content
As we discussed earlier, instructors and instructional designers tend to use the tools at their immediate disposal, and these tend to be the standard complement of programs used on PC's and MAC's in educational settings: Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Publisher, FrontPage, Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop, Captivate, TechSmith, Camtasia, etc. The majority of instructors and instructional designers do not have any formal training on how to use these tools. They tend to learn through experimentation or from peers, many of whom have no training either. Unfortunately, these common content creation tools tend not to create accessible content by default.
At the same time, institutions and teachers like to make use of the newest features as they become available in educational technology. Frequently new technologies are purchased and integrated in educational institutions without being evaluated for their accessibility.
The result is simple and clear; students with disabilities continue to struggle in their education with a large variety of inaccessible content types.
In this chapter we will discuss the accessibility issues with some of the commonly used content types and formats used in the online learning environment without providing comprehensive explanations and detailed best practices. We only highlight the most critical issues with those content types and refer the readers to more resources for further discussion.
The non-HTML document types that we will be discussing here are as follows: