Seal Chapter 11 - Notes

Do you think that there are any incentives for your organisation to develop or improve the accessibility of its online resources? If so, what are they?
Laid out in Seale Chapter 11 'Institutional Responses to Accessibility', the main incentives for HE institutions and training companies seems to be a financial one. Targeting the niche market of disabled students and attempting to win their business as a result of accessible practices. Unfortunately this incentive does not necessarily apply in my secondary education context at the current time. Firstly, the school already has a unique selling point (USP) in that it is a City Academy housed in a brand new building with ICT facilities that are outstanding in the local area. However, as the government continues to promote the City Academies programme, and other schools in the local area become converted and gain corporate sponsorship it may not be able to rely on this USP in the medium to long term.

Think back to before you started this course. Are there any assumptions you had then about whether and how to make online resources accessible? (For example, ideas about what ‘rules’ you should follow.) Have these assumptions or rules changed as a result of studying on the course? If so, why and how?
I had already done some research into the W3C WAI WCAG before starting the course so I had got a bit of an idea of some of the technical aspects of web content accessibility and some of the problems disabled people may encounter when using online content. My assumptions before the course were that the WCAG gave an all round picture of accessibility issues and that the validation tools gave a suitable indication regarding this. The main change to my assumptions has been the need for understanding of the issues and human intervention/testing to achieve accessible content.

Thinking about your organisation – can you identify people who make, enforce, advocate or implement ‘rules’ that apply to accessibility? (You may prefer to refer to roles rather than individuals.)
Senior Management Team (Enforce/Implementation), Head of Social Inclusion (Advocate), Director of ICT and ICT Support Staff inc. Web & ELearning Developer (Enforce, Implementation, Advocate)

In your context, are there any internal politics regarding accessibility? If so, what feeds the political debates: Values/principles? Costs/resources? Attitudes/beliefs? Culture/tradition?
None that I am aware of.