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February 6th, 2002

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Web Course-ware Standards

Introduction

Web based course materials are becoming increasingly important, both for distance education and to supplement traditional classes. This trend has led to an increase in the expectation that these materials will be truly accessible to all students.

The purposes of these standards are:

Location of Course Materials

There are two approaches to publishing course materials on the web. One is to use a `structured' course-ware server, such as the BlackBoard system supported on campus by the DOT.EDU utility. The other is to publish the materials as `regular' web pages outside of such a structure.

When the structured approach is employed, the particular package used will dictate where the materials will reside on the web.

For course materials published outside of these packages, the recommended location would be in the www.uwm.edu/Course/ area of the main campus server, in a sub-directory created for the particular course. Typically these subdirectories are named for the 6-digit course number. I.e. www.uwm.edu/Course/000-000/

Faculty may also publish course materials in their `personal' web area. However we recommend the /Course/ solution over this option for a number of reasons:

Faculty needing to establish new /Course/ web areas created can contact the I&MT Help Desk (x-4040 or help@uwm.edu) or the Webmaster.

Accessibility

Campus, UW System, and federal policies require that web-based course materials be accessible to persons with disabilities. Unlike with traditional course materials, it is not acceptable to meet this requirement by providing disabled students the equivalent materials on an alternative media.

For example, with traditional course-ware, it might be an acceptable accommodation to provide a blind student an audio tape of material as an alternative to a paper handout. This is permitted since the paper handout would be inherently inaccessible to a blind student. However, a web page is not inherently inaccessible. It only becomes so through poor or incomplete design. Therefore, the only acceptable accommodation for a handicapped student in a web based course is to ensure that the web materials are themselves accessible.

Happily, using practices that ensure accessibility for persons with handicaps also tend to benefit non-handicapped viewers as well.

Sponsorship and Advertising

Generally, University web pages (including course materials) may not include any paid external advertising.

It is usually allowable to include commercial logos or commercial links on course-ware pages for strictly educational purposes. E.g., as examples is an adversing or web design class. However, this might not be a case where there is some sort of financial arrangement with the commercial enterprise, such as them being a grant provider to the instructor.

There are specific rules for what is and is not allowed in cases such as this. Course-ware authors in such a situation should be aware of the relevant rules, available as part of UWM's Policies and Guidelines Concerning the Electronic Publication of Information

Specific Content Standards

  1. HTML Standards: Pages may be created using either the HTML 3.2 or the HTML 4.0 standard. However not all browsers reliably support all 4.0 features. Therefore, pages should avoid unnecesary dependence on HTML features beyond the scope of the HTML 3.2 standard. I.e., web pages that do use features beyond the scope of HTML 3.2, such as JavaScript or Cascading Style Sheets, should be designed to also display and function properly, without loss of content or navigation, on vanilla 3.2 browsers.

  2. All pages should include the complete set of high-level HTML elements (e.g., <DOCTYPE>, <HTML>, <HEAD>, and <BODY>). The HTML tag should include the `language' attribute, which provides useful clues to browsers for hyphenation, rendering special characters, speech synthesis, etc. For an English language document, this would be <HTML LANG="en">.

  3. Each document's <HEAD> element should contain a meaningful and concise <TITLE>. This is the name the page will be indexed under when book-marked by a viewer and is what appears in the browser's `Go' list.

  4. Avoid the use of <FRAME>s whenever possible. They create unnecessary problems for some browsers, they interfere with book-marking of pages, and they limit the ability to cross-link material. (To enforce a common look-and-feel across a set of pages, consider INCLUDEs.)

  5. Avoid blinking or flickering images and flashing text. Such content blinking at certain rates can affect people prone to epilepsy.

  6. Linking:

  7. Tables: When displaying tabular data, use the proper <TH> and <TD> elements to distinguish heading and data items. In more complex tables, include appropriate additional HTML (e.g. <THEAD>, <TBODY>, <THEAD>, <COLGROUP>, etc.) to ensure the relationships in the table are properly conveyed.

  8. Using color:

  9. Using images:

  10. Using Images Maps

  11. Reliance on PDF format documents is discouraged by the the World Wide Web Consortium due, in part, to the accessibility problems they create, particularly for persons with physical limitations. PDF documents can also often be much larger (slower) than the HTML or text equivalent. Use HTML or text format wherever possible. Where PDF format is used, it is good practice to provide an alternate copy in HTML or text format.

  12. Avoid distributing documents in vendor-specific formats (e.g. MSWord®, WordPerfect®). Such files are only accessible to viewers who happen to have that particular software (and often version) available on their system. Most word processors are able to export HTML (or RTF which is easily converted to HTML). Publishing the HTML version makes the document universally accessible.

  13. Multimedia: The use of audio and video content should be done in a way that is accessible to persons with either sight or hearing impairment. In many cases, this may require providing an audio description of the video content or text-based captioning to insure that both the sight and hearing impaired will have complete access to the content.

Resources

The following are some miscellaneous items that can be useful when creating web content.

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