[Athen] Question re online labs' accessibility

[Deborah Armstrong via athen-list]

What is the latest on the accessibility of online labs from the big publishers, Pearson, Cengage, Mcgraw-Hill, etc.?
We have more and more instructors requiring them and at our community colleges we get vision-impaired students new to college and new to vision loss and new to using a screen reader.
So when a student tells me that their lab is not accessible, I'm really not sure what to do. Is it the student's lack of screen reader skill, or is the lab truly not accessible? As a screen reader user myself I hear these complaints often, but I'm a worker bee, not even faculty, so there's not a lot I actually can do about the situation. We have a computer access lab where I send students to get one-on-one assistance, but I often don't know if the lab is really going to work out for them.
I can get an access code from the instructor and play with the lab a little, but it takes time away from what I'm supposed to be doing. Because I'm a screen reader user myself, students and instructors think I have magic solutions. And once in a while I actually do. But not always.
When I've taken courses using some of these labs, I haven't run in to a lot of access issues, and the few I had were easy to work around. But that doesn't mean my students' complaints are not real.
I am curious how often this is occurring, and what you on this list typically do to resolve the issue.
--Debee


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