“Arguments against web access use cost arguments speciously. An “expensive” course would cost $30,000 to adapt; a “less-expensive” one $15,000, went one such discussion. Other estimates say providing access costs $2,000 to $3,000 a course. Yet both examples imply that access is something to be “added on” to an already-designed inaccessible course. In fact, following accessible design principles and using the accessible features of ready-made software costs nothing more at all. Designing for access can often be cheaper, since one can eschew the bells and whistles of high-end graphics and animation that make many sites inaccessible but which are totally unnecessary in terms of communicating content.
At any rate, says Loughborough, “programmers now are much cheaper than lawyers later.”
Even if online education does become accessible, the jury is still out on whether such distance learning is the boon it’s said to be for disabled people.
A Harris Poll last year reported that 48 percent of disabled people using the web had “significant improvement” in their lives, compared to 27 percent of nondisabled people. Maybe that means that the Internet is good. Maybe it means something else: inability to navigate store aisles, condescending attitudes of personnel, and a transportation system that may mean spending hours to make a store visit. Disabled skeet-shooters may enjoy the hobby more that their nondisabled peers; it doesn’t follow that if more disabled people took up skeet-shooting their lives would improve.
Worries that distance learning will become a way to enforce “separate and unequal” are not unfounded: “If ‘they’ can take classes over the web, we don’t have to make classrooms accessible,” we can imagine administrators thinking. Online courses may offer a new means of segregating “difficult” students. What better way to show students they are “special” than to deport them to the cyberclassroom where they can’t be disruptive?”