Online Version Available Free of Charge (http//ncam.wgbh.org/salt) Boston, MA. September 19, 2002. A groundbreaking collaboration among international players in the online learning field has resulted in a set of guidelines to educate the eLearning community about the challenges that people with disabilities face in accessing online education, and to provide solutions and resources to solve them. Major support of these efforts is provided by the Learning Anywhere Anytime Partnerships program* of the U.S. Department of Education. "IMS Guidelines for Creating Accessible Learning Technologies" is a joint publication of the IMS Global Learning Consortium, and the CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM). The IMS Guidelines are available on the Web in a screen-reader friendly format as well as in PDF (http//ncam.wgbh.org/salt) and are expected to be an invaluable resource for a broad range of stakeholders in online education, including educators providing online learning materials, developers of learning software such as learning management systems and educational software, and educational publishers, content authors, authoring tool developers and parents, advocates and students with disabilities themselves. Users will find the IMS Guidelines a comprehensive source on accessibility, which includes principles for accessibility in online learning, accessible delivery of text, audio, images and multimedia, using XML for accessibility, and legal issues for accessible distance learning *************************** End of announcement ------------------------- Barrier-free E-learning is an online month-long course provided by EASI devoted to exploring the problems and solutions for making e-learning accessible to people with disabilities. The next offering starts on November 4. http://easi.cc/workshops/bfel.htm Norman Coombs, Ph.D. CEO of EASI http://www.rit.edu/~easi