In my three years of teaching I have not really dealt with disable students. I had a deaf student in my class in 7th grade and in 9th grade and I had a student who had limited use of his hands but he had an assistant to help him out. For the deaf student subtitles was an easy fix for media.
I have, however, had a multitude of students with learning disabilities. As I have come to use computers and the internet more and more in my classroom I have found that design considerations for my classroom website and choices I make concerning educational websites should be made with these students in mind.
I think as a general rule, reading or gathering information from the web is different from more traditional text based sources. Many students are used to multitasking while on the internet and so sitting down to look at one source at a time for 20 minutes may be a different computer experience for them. For this reason it is important to design learning activities on the computer with student's prior knowledge and habits in mind.
Navigation and brevity are key. Students may give up easily if they get lost in a website. As a teacher it is important to offer the link as a clickable hypertext so that students don't have to type the link themselves. It is also important to offer instructions for navigation that are short and simple. With reading on the web it is important to keep it brief. If it is a long passage then break it up into chunks so that students don't get lost. Questions to go along with the reading can help quite a bit in guiding students.
The internet is a blessing to education. As teachers we should sell this outlook to our students and not make things too complicated and overwhelming.
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