ABSTRACT A lack of awareness of disability issues in the provision of digital educational material is resulting in a situation where much of this material is, to some degree, inaccessible to people with certain disabilities. Current and proposed disability legislation in countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom means that any educational material produced by institutions, and which has accessibility barriers, may soon be illegal. This paper discusses the issues involved in the provision of accessible digital material, with a heavy emphasis on Web‐based resources, with a view to raising awareness and avoiding a potentially embarrassing situation for educational institutions. The various assistive technologies used by disabled people to access digital material are discussed, along with the problems by inaccessible material, illustrated by examples of inaccessible Web pages. Solutions for ensuring the accessibility of digital material are provided, including a discussion of open standards and guidelines and principles of accessible content design

A majority of Web based information, facilities and services is unnecessarily inaccessible to people with certain disabilities, largely due to a lack of awareness of accessibility issues on the part of developers. This paper argues that currently available accessibility evaluation methods are unsatisfactory in the scope and presentation of their results. Consequently, there is a need for a meta- method which utilises the strengths of current methods, but which also bridges their weaknesses. The paper discusses a comprehensive, yet usable methodology for evaluating web sites for accessibility. Using this methodology, a semi- automatic accessibility evaluation tool is proposed, which will guide evaluators through the auditing process and produce a set of tailored recommendations for making the subject site accessible.

A questionnaire concerned with gender issues was completed by 2029 women and 2137 men students at a Scottish University. Of the women respondents, 1252 answered a question about whether they thought of themselves as feminists; 5% ticked 'always', 9% 'often', 59% 'occasionally' and 27% 'never'. Women in the 36-45 year old age bracket and postgraduate women were most likely to identify as feminists. This question was included in a factor analysis with items concerning gender roles. It loaded strongly only on the third factor, which linked strong feminist identification to an endorsement of an essentialist model of gender differences. Analysis of extended comments in response to a question about the image of feminism indicated that both male and female students were affected by negative stereotypes of feminism in the media. It was concluded that the study showed a somewhat stronger level of identification with feminism than previous studies.

The experiment reported in this paper used a delayed same/different sentence matching task with concurrent measurement of eye movements to investigate three questions: whether pragmatic plausibility effects are restricted to certain phrasal environments; how rapidly such effects are shown in on-line sentence processing; and whether they are a product of optional, high-level, inferential processes. The results clearly show that plausibility effects are not restricted to low–level phrasal units and that they appear to arise as a necessary consequence of the process responsible for deriving basic sentence meaning. The rapid and highly localized nature of the effects supports a view of sentence processing involving incremental interpretation of the earliest available syntactic representations. We argue that the apparently mandatory nature of plausibility effects, coupled with their insensitivity to repetition context, presents difficulties for both modular and interactive views of sentence processing.