eLearning for everyone: How to address accessibility

Unless your strategy is to invest in your own in-house accessibility expertise, the natural first step is to find the right partner to advise and assist you.

 

Firstly, they’ll understand the requirements of any legislation you need to comply with. Secondly, if you’re interested in more than compliance – because, let’s face it, ticking compliance boxes is not always the same as taking a best-practice approach – they’ll be able to explain different standards and what you could be doing to transform learning through accessibility improvements. There’s a difference, for example, between a basic screen reader experience, which may be good enough for compliance, and a great screen reader experience, which makes a real difference to usability.

 

Thirdly, they’ll be able to help you develop a roadmap and plan to achieve your eLearning accessibility objectives.

Every respectable accessibility improvement plan starts with an audit against the relevant standards to establish what accessibility gaps exist. Once these are identified, the next step is remediation – fixing the identified accessibility issues – so it’s worth considering from the start whether you want your accessibility partner to help you with this.

 

If you’re happy to handle remediation in-house or through a different partner, then it won’t matter if the accessibility specialist you choose doesn’t have specific expertise with eLearning platforms, hosted assets and content formats. But if you do expect to need their remediation support, it can be a big advantage if they are also eLearning specialists. Consider this carefully before making your choice – and don’t forget that accessibility covers both your eLearning platform and the training content that it holds.

Hopefully localization is part of your eLearning strategy, since L&D has a greater chance of success when it happens in the learner’s native language. But this means that accessibility testing must cover all the languages you localize into. Even if you’re applying the same accessibility standards across countries and languages (legislative differences may mean this isn’t the case), it simply doesn’t follow that if your eLearning is accessible in one language, it will automatically be accessible in any other.

 

For example, what if your eLearning platform doesn’t accept voice commands in all of the languages you cater to? Or what if the way you’ve handled forced line breaks for certain Asian languages causes real trouble for screen readers?

 

When you’re choosing an accessibility partner, make sure that they cover all of the languages you need. If they’re helping you with remediation, they also need to know coding best practices that address the user experience from both a localization and accessibility point of view – not compromising one for the sake of the other.

 

Another way in which localization and accessibility can go hand in hand is that the right localization partner can make a big difference to your accessibility journey. For example, video accessibility might feel like a big hurdle to clear, but it isn’t if your localization partner also offers (multilingual) accessible content services such as closed captions, signed videos, audio description and descriptive transcripts.

eLearning accessibility isn’t a one-off project that you complete and forget. It takes continuing vigilance and an accessibility-first approach to platform and content development. Otherwise, improvements made will be undone over time.

 

If you use a third-party eLearning platform or rely on eLearning vendors for course design and development, you’ll need to engage with them to achieve your accessibility objectives. If you do any of this in-house, you’ll need to update your own software standards, guidelines and checklists, and educate your software engineers and learning designers to put accessibility front and centre.

 

There’s certainly a lot to get right when it comes to eLearning accessibility. But that doesn’t mean it needs to be painful. Help exists to make the complex more controllable and achievable. I hope I’ve inspired you to get started.