This Is Not News

One of the major issues that comes up in my computers-and-education course is the idea of making electronic content accessible to people who use alternate technologies for reading/consuming information online. Intellectually this makes a lot of sense to me, but I’ve had some gut level resistance. And I think when you get down to it, the reason is that I’ve distributed course notes as PDF files for a few years now. My logic was that I didn’t want students to have to worry about how a browser would mangle the notes and make them harder to read or follow, and I do think that that’s a valid concern. But the problem is that PDFs are rotten for screen readers and other software that people with vision handicaps or other problems might use to navigate the web. So now I seriously have to think about re-formatting these online notes as XHTML pages with cascading style sheets, and at least see how they print out. Yeesh. Technology. Can’t live with it, can’t live without it.