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I dislike the term accessibility. It is an accurate enough term. It just conjures up the wrong preconceptions. When you talk about accessibility people's eyes glaze over. They are either imagining wheelchair ramps or WCAG checklists. Either way, it does nothing to capture the truth about accessibility. Accessibility is not about designing for the few. It is designing for us all. Tweet this That is why I have started talking about inclusive design instead. Accessibility is about designing for everybody, not the few. It is not about designing just for the disabled. It is about designing for every one of us.

A group of renowned disability studies scholars are seeking to clarify what makes a book accessible with a set of guidelines that authors can use to help publishers make their books readable by anyone.

The guidelines, a one-page template letter, read a little like an ultimatum. The letter opens by asking a would-be publisher to confirm in writing that print books and accessible formats will be made available simultaneously, then launches into an explanation of how publishers should handle everything from digital rights management to authoring software.

Lennard J. Davis, professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said the letter is meant less to threaten a boycott and more as a public service announcement. Some authors may not budge from the demands in the letter, he said, but others are likely to use it as a way to spread awareness about accessibility.

The external auditor's report told Paire that Temple was on par with other institutions that hadn't really addressed this issue, and the university needed to address gaps in learning spaces, labs, instructional materials and the Web. Some institutions focus mainly on Web accessibility, Paire noted. "But when we looked at what happened at Penn State, it was obvious we couldn't just focus on the Web. We needed to address the institution as a whole. We needed a much broader scope."

These accessibility tips are focused on ensuring individuals who are blind can use your resources, yet they can improve the experience of anyone using it!

Don't make people hover to find things.

The most obvious factor that learners Spectrum-wide see as valuable is academic quality. That almost goes without saying, but it needs to be kept at the top of the list even though it is what we assume from all our institutions.

Beyond that, though, I would say there are three things: responsiveness, credibility and context.

Hacking access to academic articles

"The findings also show faculty members are creating new opportunities with technology. Through experimentation with online education, for example, faculty members say they are able to serve a more diverse set of students and think more critically about how to engage students with course content, and with free and open course materials, they say they are increasing access to education."

"At rOpenSci we are creating packages that allow access to data repositories through the R statistical programming environment that is already a familiar part of the workflow of many scientists. Our tools not only facilitate drawing data into an environment where it can readily be manipulated, but also one in which those analyses and methods can be easily shared, replicated, and extended by other researchers."

Via Stephen Downes's recent post; a nice accessible summary discussion for non-techies about how technology is changing teaching. Good teaching resource, I think.

""We were initially torn between collaborating with universities and working outside the world of college," Thrun tells me. The San Jose State pilot offered the answer. "These were students from difficult neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in their lives," he says. "It's a group for which this medium is not a good fit.""

Interesting guy to talk to etc. at some point. "In the 17th century, scholar-publishers created the first scientific journals, revolutionising the communication and practice of scholarship. Today, we're at the beginning of a second revolution, as academia slowly awakens to the tranformative potential of the Web.   I'm interested in both pushing this revolution forward, and in studying it as it happens. I'm investigating altmetrics: measuring scholarly impact over the social web instead of through traditional citation. I'm also interested in new publishing practices like scholarly tweeting, overlay journals, alternative peer review forms, and open access. These slides give a good idea of what I've been up to lately; my CV links to other recent publications and talks. "

The Web promised openness. Open access. Open knowledge. A wide open space for creativity. Collaboration. Distribution. Instead what we have today is a mass of information silos and content farms. What we have today, if we're honest with ourselves, are old hierarchies hard-coded onto new ones.

"Here is my grand vision. Imagine with me. What if your syllabi were beautiful? What if they were a pleasure for students to engage with? What if they provided opportunities to not only understand and access policies, expectations, schedules and such, but for our students to meet us?  What if the syllabus became a site where former students could share voices (stories, feedback, words of encouragement) with future students? Isn't THIS what our goal should be as we move into this amazing landscape of mobile, digital media?"