What are best practices for instructors and designers when building online courses sensitive to ADA?
What are public or private college-university’s responsibilities to students with disabilities?
Is money available and specifically relevant to assisting persons with disabilities in online activity and digital participation?
1. The bottom line is the best practices and guidelines that have evolved into what is commonly referred to as “universal design.” It’s really not that complicated (people tend to overthink it)…using the old 80/20 rule, 80% of the best practices for ADA specifically are taken care of through captioning, alt tags, text alternatives and structured text/headers.
On UDL: http://universaldesign.ie/What-is-Universal-Design/
Some useful reading on UDL for online courses: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1068401.pdf
2. Public and private universities have the same obligations to make reasonable accommodation for learners who make it known, generally through working with an office for disability services. For public materials that are free and open, it gets more complicated, particularly given the recent Berkeley contretemps (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/mar/7/berkeley-removing-20k-free-educational-videos-afte/)
3. There’s no standing federal program providing fund, so it comes down to the institutions and what they might provide. At UAF, for example, there is essentially no funding set aside for these activities. Fortunately, because of what I said in #1 above, most of the cost is indirect for eLearning…the big exception is third party services for captioning, which can get quite expensive, though it’s ultimately less expensive to outsource than to pay for the hours required for DIY.