Did you know that in France, people with a disability are given free admission to the famous art gallery, the Louvre.
While online content is rarely as mesmerising as the Mona Lisa, many government departments are now required to provide accessible online content to internal staff and the public.
But what does that really mean?
Accessible online content should be available and understandable to anyone—regardless of physical, visual, auditory or mental impairment, or language proficiency.
The reported percentages of users with disability only marginally differ across the globe. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) records that 1 in 5 people reported that they had a disability. In the USA this figure is 12.1 per cent, and in the UK almost 1 in 5 people (19%) have a disability.
Convert those percentages into people and we are talking about literally millions of users.
But how many of these disabilities affect your department's staff when using a computer to do a task like accounts receivable? Or how many people in your public audience need a screen reader to use a claims portal?
Even if the answer turned out to be one out of 10,000, that person has as much right as anyone else to learn how to use the software/services being offered.
While this article will be useful for developers, I particularly want to talk to the 'project stakeholders' – the people who drive these projects – about what to think about when contracting someone to design and build your eLearning course.
Firstly, What Do We Mean by 'eLearning'?
eLearning is simply the delivery of learning content on a computer/tablet/smartphone via a series of screens or ‘slides’— viewable at any time rather than scheduled in a classroom. Some eLearning has embedded short video clips (eg person speaking, or screen recording of an application), interactive activities such as entering words into sentences and can also include assessment like multiple choice quizzes that provide instant feedback.
Organisations commonly use eLearning for training because it is available at any time and can be delivered to hundreds and thousands of people.
Many universities offer eLearning for some course units. eLearning can get funky too, with competitive game elements such as the Till Training Game designed for McDonalds employees (by City and Guilds Kineo).
The Cost of Accessible eLearning
Let's not dance around it: Accessible eLearning takes longer to design and develop and therefore costs more. The higher the accessibility level you seek, the more time and effort it is to achieve a 'pass'.
Invariably extra time will be required to:
- run each page through an accessibility checker (such as the WAVE tool shown below)
- test with a screen reader,
- write effective transcripts for video,
- write useful and detailed ALT attributes for charts and,
- include file size descriptions for downloads.
While there is some level of automation available, to accurately test accessibility compliance, manual checking is mandatory. How much longer accessible eLearning design and development takes depends on your eLearning provider: experienced vendors will already well-established processes in place staffed with trained personnel already familiar with the success criteria and even perhaps reusable framework elements already designed for accessibility. This is a big advantage.
Converting non-accessible eLearning into accessible eLearning
Unfortunately there is no magic 'one-click' button for converting existing eLearning content into accessible eLearning content — especially if the original output is Flash-based (as is often the case).
The 'conversion' time depends on factors such as base code, level of interactivity, presence of audio and video. Sure, there are definitely some quick wins, like providing ALT attributes to images, but if you have five-minute long videos with audio and animation, you have some work to do.
There are many other potential access issues to consider. For instance:
- Does the content rely on drag and drop interactions?
- Is important and relevant content text embedded within images?
The truth is, often it may be more efficient to rebuild the course from the ground up using different eLearning authoring software and techniques than trying to retro-fit accessibility into older course materials.
Continue reading %Tips for Creating Accessible eLearning Resources%
by Adrienne Gross via SitePoint
