The short answer: The accessibility of Learning Management Systems is improved with each new release.

The long answer: The American Government, through Section 508, an amendment made in August,1998 to its Rehabilitation Act 1973, makes it unlawful for Federal agencies to purchase or use electronic and information technology that is inaccessible for persons with disabilities. As a consequence of the enactment of this legislation, software vendors who sell to the American Government must now address compliance with Section 508 or face the loss of what is probably their largest client. This situation also faces the vendors of online course delivery software.

WebCT started to address compliance with Section 508 with the release of Version 3.6 Campus Edition. Further improvements have been made to later versions and since the purchase of Web CT by Blackboard..

Section 508 requirements for web-based technology and information are based on the Checkpoints of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium, containing most of Priority one and some Priority 2 and 3 Checkpoints. Section 508 includes those W3C Checkpoints that can be measured in some way, or can be answered definitely yes or no. This is because the US Government approach to legislation relating to people with disabilities is to enforce conformance to specified conditions and penalise transgressions, whereas the approach taken in Australian legislation is to make it unlawful to discriminate.

It may be possible that software that conforms to Section 508 may have features that may contribute in some way to discrimination of disabled users outside of the United States, but it is outside the scope of this web site to speculate on how likely this is.