Michael Emery

Mission control

Summer 2020 - CTDO Magazine

CLO Michael Dorsey ensures that every Department of Human Services employee has the training they need to serve Maryland residents.

Dedicated to Serving

An understanding of the need for better online accessibility has grown markedly in recent years, perhaps accelerated by the digital shift during the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020. Legislation in different parts of the world has also been a driver of awareness and action.Accessible learning is good for everyone.As an online activity, e-learning falls squarely within the scope of accessibility requirements. But whether you’re responding to a compliance deadline, pressure from customers, or a corporate commitment to diversity and inclusion, it’s well worth noting that designing training with accessibility in mind can enrich the learning experience for everyone, not just those with a defined disability. So, accessibility should be a priority for any L&D professional who wants to optimize the learning experience.Where to start?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.First, they should understand the requirements of any legislation you need to comply with. Second, 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 for usability.Third, they should be able to help you develop a roadmap and a plan to achieve your e-learning accessibility objectives.Consider remediation from the start.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 e-learning 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 e-learning specialists. Consider this carefully before making your choice—and don’t forget that accessibility covers both your e-learning platform and the training content that it holds.Consider the impact of localization.Hopefully, localization is part of your e-learning 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 e-learning is accessible in one language, it will automatically be accessible in any other.For example, what if your e-learning 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 that 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 descriptions, and descriptive transcripts.It's an ongoing process.E-learning 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 you make will be undone over time.If you use a third-party e-learning platform or rely on e-learning 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 center.There’s certainly a lot to get right when it comes to e-learning 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.