"At Your Service: Welcoming Customers with Disabilities"

A self-paced online course for frontline staff at One-Stop Centers. Its focus is on the principles of good customer service when working with customers who have disabilities.

This document offers two different sections of information on the webcourse:



Course Content

The course is divided into 12 Sections, and should take about 4 hours to complete. We recommend the content of this course be studied in order. For example, read Section 1, then Section 2, and so on. However, each section can be accessed individually for future study through the "Course Index" and "Resources".

The first six sections focus on conveying basic information centered around a themed question. Each section has an interactive, self-correcting quiz that allows the users to test their knowledge. These sections also offer sidebars to additional resources, such as access checklists, disability etiquette, and information about specific access and nondiscrimination statues.

  1. Welcoming People to the One-Stop
    Who are customers with disabilities and how do I welcome them?
        -- Test Your Knowledge: Disability Facts
  2. Disability Etiquette
    How do I treat someone with a disability?
        -- Test Your Knowledge: Disability Interaction
  3. Access for Everyone
    How does a Center provide universal access?
        -- Test Your Knowledge: Access Laws
  4. Making a One-Stop Accessible
    How can I tell if my One-Stop Center is readily accessible?
        -- Test Your Knowledge: Universal Access
  5. Reasonable Accommodations
    What types of reasonable accommodations or program modifications might need to be made?
        -- Test Your Knowledge: Making Reasonable Accommodations
  6. Non-Discrimination at the One-Stop
    What do Federal laws and regulations say about the rights of customers with disabilities?
        -- Test Your Knowledge: Disability Rights

The next five sections are case studies. Each study focuses on a different type of disability and allows the user to explore the types of reasonable accommodations, program modifications and access features that customers with visual, physical, cognitive, hearing or psychiatric disabilities might require in order to benefit from the programs and services offered at a One-Stop Center. Each five-part study also offers some interactive questions and ends with a section of links to additional resources for learning about that specific disability.

Section 12 entitled "Course Resources" contains several informative documents including a Glossary of Course Terms and a list of Course References. This section together with the the Course Index and Course Feedback form can be accessed from any page in the course.

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Course Navigation and Accessibility

The "At Your Service" webcourse was designed to be useful and accessible to the widest audience possible. To this end, the webcourse conforms to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG) established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These guidelines explain how to make web content accessible to people with disabilities and benefit all users through three priority checkpoints:
Priority 1 (must satisfy for basic accessibility),
Priority 2 (should satisfy to remove significant accessibility barriers),
Priority 3 (may satisfy to improve accessibility).

This webcourse conforms to Level "Triple-A" of these guidelines available at http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WAI-WEBCONTENT-19990505, levelTripleA. This means that all Priority 1, 2, and 3 applicable checkpoints are satisfied.

The guidelines also define two major themes for web accessibility:
1. Ensuring Graceful Transformation
2. Making Content Understandable and Navigable.
To achieve these goals, several general navigation aids are used in this webcourse as described below.


Keyboard Shortcut Navigation

This course has been programmed to offer keyboard shortcuts for course navigation and some frequently used links. The "shortcut keys" described below are noted with the letter key and the corresponding letter within the link name in bold. For example: l to go to the Login to Course Form

Please note there is variable support among browsers and systems for using these shortcuts. Currently, Internet Explorer 4.0 or above but NOT Netscape Navigator allows the user to select the appropriate "attention" key (this also varies but usually "Cmd" for Macintosh machines and "Alt" for Windows machines), then select the following letter:

However, since technology changes so rapidly, also realize that besides the above technique, there may be other systems which could use different shortcut methods, or perhaps even allow the "shortcut key" to be used by itself (without the need for the "attention" key).

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Course Buttons

On the top and bottom of each course page after the course title ("AT YOUR SERVICE") are the following buttons that take you to the respectively named pages: Course Feedback, Course Index, and Resources. However, if you are viewing one of these pages, that respective button will not be visible. (i.e. If you are viewing the "Resources" page, the button for "Resources" will not be seen.)

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Navigating Between Course Sections

On the right of each course section page after the section title appears the following:

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Navigating Section Content

Within each course page, links are provided to take the user to the associated page information. However, please note some links may not be visible to some users of graphical browsers. These "hidden" links are programmed into the page as they are particularly helpful for people using non-graphical or "text" browsers and people who are using alternative technology, such as screen readers, to access the computer.

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