Assessing the accessibility of E-learning

Equal participation for people with special needs is an important objective in education politics. Governments have a strong emphasis on enabling education for all citizens. The trend of using e-learning both for on campus and remote delivery of students has the potential of enabling new opportunities for people who previously faced challenges following education. On the other hand, providing online education bears the risk of creating new barriers. This paper examines different stages of providing educational content and delivering teaching material online. This is based on practical experiences from Noroff University College providing a bachelor degree in a security related area. Based on both practical experiences and state of the art literature review, we analyze potential accessibility barriers, and investigate how the barriers can be identified and removed based on state of the art accessibility measurement techniques. Consequently, this paper is a first step towards a methodology on assessing e-learning content based on accessibility. This methodology would assist others in obtaining an overview concerning the degree of accessibility of their own learning materials.