The art of ALT: toward a more accessible Web

✍ Scribed by John M. Slatin

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2001
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 175 KB
• Volume: 18
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 8755-4615
• DOI: 10.1016/s8755-4615(00)00049-9

✦ Synopsis

Continuing innovations in pedagogical uses of the Web are consistent with our discipline's long-standing commitment to the expansion of literacy. Surging interest in multimedia and visual rhetoric emphasizes the importance of the 1999 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as a tool for instructors seeking to make their Web documents accessible to learners and colleagues who have disabilities. Text-only variants of media-rich sites are not sufficient; on the Web, as on our campuses, separate is not and cannot be equal. Changes in the way we approach designing class Web sites may be necessary to enable all learners to participate equally in the learning community. Accessibility is not a property of the document: It is situated in specific contexts and distributed across multiple agents and artifacts. A Web experience designed to be rich and meaningful for people with disabilities is likely to be rich and meaningful for those without disabilities as well; however, the reverse is not necessarily true.