e-Assessment and Accessibility

Recently, I’ve been doing work looking at accessibility implications of electronic assessment (e-assessment for short). E-assessment covers any use of electronic means, often a web interface, to ask questions of and gather information or evidence from a user in order to provide some form of assessment of their levels of knowledge, skills or competencies in  a particular subject or activity.

From a technical perspective, this is related to electronic survey accessibility, which in turn could easily be seen as a real world instance of accessible web form design plus accessible navigation; and therefore covered by a subset of WCAG 2.0. However, it’s not as straightforward as that.

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Perfect Circle

One of the most frustrating yet fascinating challenges to achieving an optimally accessible Web is trying to complete a perfect circle. Three parts of that circle are covered by the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative’s triumvirate of guidelines: conformant content (WCAG), created by conformant authoring tools (ATAG), and accessed using conformant user agents (UAAG). This approach has some practical flaws – not least in that there’s a missing part of the circle: conformant users.

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