Activity 1.3 - How does your own situation relate to accessibility?

I currently work as Web and ELearning Developer for a secondary school in the west midlands. The school was one of the first to be built as part of the UK governments City Academies program and has excellent facilities and ICT provision. I look after the school's website, intranet and so on but the majority of my time is concerned with the school's online curriculum. It's part of the schools mission statement that all of the curriculum should be accessible for students and their parents from home. As part of my online curriculum responsibilities I find and evaluate useful online tools and resources, and make them available to teaching staff. I produce multimedia online curriculum materials in collaboration with staff. This might be games, quizzes, videos, sounds, animation or presentations. I produce training materials for staff on technical processes for producing online curriculum materials and promote best practices for the creation of online content. I also provide technical support for the online curriculum content management software.

I don't currently have any contact with disabled students, however the school's facilities increasingly attracts applications from students with special needs. At the start of this academic year the intake included students who have visual imparement, hearing difficulties and physical disability. As a result I expect it will become increasingly important for me to develop my own understanding of accessibility for online learning and be able to communicate that to the school's teaching staff.

I already have some experience and understanding of online accessibility issues as I have built websites in accordance with the W3C web accessibility guidelines and I am looking forward to building on that during H810.