Sunday, March 04, 2007

LearnOutLoud.com appears promising, but has accessibility concerns

I recently learned of an interesting clearinghouse for audio and video learning resources.

LearnOutLoud.com
Claims to have more than 10,000 educational audio books, podcasts, mp3 downloads, as well as videos at its disposal. They boast to have the internet’s largest collection of these items. Of this vast collection, they have more than 500 audio and video titles which are free. It does have a searchable database that appears to have strong potential.
The site also hawks an e-magazine and a “Free resource of the day” email.

This all sounds good and promising, but I have not personally delved any deeper into their offerings beyond the home page. I find the web site to be very cluttered and several of the links in dire need of alt tags. It is not very screen reader friendly and that’s both sad and ironic. It would be to the advantage of the site’s owners if they would realize that their project could be of great service to the population of students with disabilities, but to serve this population, they will need to address the accessibility of the overall site.

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