Collaborations
Upcoming Teleconferences
- BPDCC, 2008-05-16 at 2:00-4:00 PM EDT; 1:00-3:00 PM CDT
- Location: http://www.conference321.com/masteradmin/room.asp?id=rs33b7e00bb22d
- Blackboard, 2008-05-20 at 2:00 PM EDT; 1:00 PM CDT; 12:00 PM MDT; 11:00 AM PDT
- Location: BB-DOC/217-265-6999; TC Conferencing
- Blackboard, 2008-06-02 at 2:30 PM EDT; 1:30 PM CDT; 12:30 PM MDT; 11:30 AM PDT
- Location: General/217 265-8030
- Blackboard, 2008-07-07 at 2:30 PM EDT; 1:30 PM CDT; 12:30 PM MDT; 11:30 AM PDT
- Location: General/217 265-8030
- Blackboard, 2008-08-04 at 2:30 PM EDT; 1:30 PM CDT; 12:30 PM MDT; 11:30 AM PDT
- Location: General/217 265-8030
Previous Teleconferences
- Blackboard, 2008-05-08 at 2:00 PM EDT; 1:00 PM CDT; 12:00 PM MDT; 11:00 AM PDT
- Blackboard, 2008-05-05 at 2:30 PM EDT; 1:30 PM CDT; 12:30 PM MDT; 11:30 AM PDT
- Desire2Learn, 2008-05-02 at 8:00 AM MST, 10:00 AM CDT, 11:00 AM EDT, 4:00 PM BST
- BPDCC, 2008-05-02 at 2:00-4:00 PM EDT; 1:00-3:00 PM CDT
- Desire2Learn, 2008-04-18 at 4:00 PM GMT; 11:00 AM EDT; 10:00 AM CDT; 9:00 AM MDT; 8:00 AM PDT
The University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign has started several collaboration initiatives where educational institutions with similar interests work together toward resolving common accessibility issues.
These interest groups work together with software vendors and their development and QA teams to illustrate accessibility problems. Issues identified by our groups educate vendors to understand the problems and provide alternative solutions. Everyone, including the users with disabilities, can benefit from the changes. Some of the interest groups include Course Management system providers such as Blackboard/WebCT and Desire to learn, Library Resource vendors such as Ebsco Publishing, Ex Libris, and Elsevier, and WebMail providers such as MiraPoint. .
Accessibility/usability testers among the members of our interest groups test vendors' software on demo servers provided by the corresponding vendors to identify accessibility problems with upcoming releases. This way, vendors have an opportunity to identify accessibility problems and address them before the software is released publicly.