D4.4.4

=Compliance with policies, standards and guidelines governing accessibility is regularly monitored. =

Evidence
To improve e-learning outcomes it is important to learn from past mistakes, according to Ehrmann (2002), who argues that tracking progress is not only necessary to stay on course but also to identify solvable problems that can attract fresh resources (p. 55). The results of monitoring should be used to inform ongoing and new development, and to support resources and strategy. Information on performance can be used as a tool for improving quality, but only if the information is disseminated. Such validation of e-learning practices and resources is a significant stage in the full cycle of organisational learning that describes success in terms of ‘student performance, student satisfaction, staff experience, and cost effectiveness, as judged in relation to the original intentions’ (Salmon, 2000, p. 236). Salmon discusses validating as one of six activities in the iterative process of creating an effective learning organisation infrastructure that enables ‘the system to learn about itself’ (p. 237).

Seale (2006) argues that the general move in accessibility should be away from the idea that practitioners should be thinking their objective is to comply with the rules, their objective, and the objective of e-learning accessibility ought to be to address the needs of learners.

Sloan & Walker (2008) explain the standard tripartite approach to creating a truly accessible web. This involves adherence to the WCAG-conformant content, created using ATAG-conformant authoring tools, accessed using WAAG-conformant browsing technology. However, they then argue that there are problems with this approach, one is that there is a scarcity of authoring tools that meet the ATAG guidelines. The importance of appropriate authoring tools is mainly due to the fact that increasingly authors are not dedicated web professionals. This places responsibility on web content authoring tools to ensure that all authors can easily create content that is as accessible as possible.