Accessibility Working Group

Background
In December 2006 a new duty to promote disability equality came into force for public sector bodies. The Disability Equality Duty requires institutions to build disability equality into all activities, promoting positive attitudes towards disabled people and taking steps to meet their needs.

At Nottingham Trent University we are taking an institution-wide approach to promote accessibility and to help inform the choice of the new VLE (NOW) implemented over the last year. The Accessibility Working Group has been set-up to guide this work. We are focussing equally on the following:

• how the NTU Online Workspace, NOW, makes its resources accessible to disabled people
• how it supports the authoring of accessible content by all authors, regardless of technical expertise. 

The Accessibility Working Group is also working on the development of sustainable approach, policy, guidelines, training and awareness programmes. The aim is to get staff to consider accessibility issues in curriculum content design and to support good learning experiences for all students.

To take this work forward, the University is collaborating with the VLE vendor, Desire2Learn, through its transnational Usability Forum. The University has also commissioned external accessibility evaluations of the VLE carried out by Digital Media Access Group (DMAG), University of Dundee.

For further information about accessibility, please see the following wiki page (NTU authentication required).