Government funding has been given to a university consortium establishing a repository of resources for school teachers. They have engaged you to develop a search facility for teachers who will use it to discover small chunks of useful material, located anywhere. The chunks will be strung together to make customised lessons for students who cannot attend school, for one reason or another, or whose teachers do not include specialists in subjects the students want to study. The client group knows that it is more 'attractive' to their funding agency if there is a lot of multimedia product in the selection. You know that it is hard to produce accessible multimedia and there is hardly any 'out there'. You are asked to advise your client about accessibility.

Q1 What is going on? - What are the facts?

I. I report to the university consortium.

II. I am to develop a repository search facility for school teachers to extract useful teaching materials to develop suitable lessons.

III. Target students are supervised by non-specialists (possibly remotely, at home, or in care).

IV. The government funding agency likes multimedia.

V. Accessible multimedia content is scarce and 'hard' to develop.

VI. The consortium requires ‘accessibility' advice.

Q What are the issues?

VII. What are the contractual details/arrangements?

VIII. Accessible multimedia may be costly to develop. There appears to be a funding bias towards multimedia content. How much multimedia is envisaged? Would a simple multimedia put funding at risk? Advice to the consortium might be rejected (along with this job) by recommending a simple, 'non-glossy' approach.

IX. What are the exact requirements for the multimedia? What standards are to be applied? What is the budget for it and how much of that is for the extra accessibility work?

X. Sophisticated multimedia is unlikely to be easily accessed/afforded by all supervisors or students due to special needs and telecommunications inequities.

XI. What range of resources do supervisors/teachers and students have ready access to?

XII. What range of disabilities do the target students suffer, if any? How will these be identified and accounted for?

XIII. What level of training and support is envisaged for teachers, non-specialist supervisors and students?

XIV. It is not clear if 'normal' school teachers are to benefit from this system.