eLearning Accessibility: Guidelines and Standards Offer for Interpretation That Can Enhance the Design Process

In the world of accessibility, it is sometimes a struggle to sort through all of our standards and resources to determine the best ways to design and test our products for compliance. Unfortunately, it is too easy to simply find a solution by limiting design and development to a few standardized elements that can be easily passed or failed. In actuality, the guidelines and standards offer us room for interpretation that can enhance the design process and produce both creative and compliant results. 

Here are some examples:

• Don't sacrifice layout tables. Just be sure your layout tables don't have identified headers and don't use blank cells for layout purposes.
• Don't force sequential tabbing order on all Captivate slides. You can allow random tabbing as long as the information is not sequential and the user experience isn't negatively affected.
• Don't merely mirror slide text in the slide notes on every eLearning slide in your eLearning authoring tool. Create slide notes and alt text for the visually impaired user that contain additional instructive and helpful information that will enhance user experience, especially for interactions.
• Don't give up on colors that don't initially meet the color contrast requirements. Experiment with enlarging the text, bolding the text, or creating borders around the text where you can.

I totally agree with this quote from the W3C accessibility testing wiki: "accessibility is a goal, not a yes/no setting." I hope to use this space to offer helpful information and tips to assist you in developing creative and conscientious approaches to accessibility.

 

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Looking to create awesome accessible eLearning? Check out JoAnne's live, online mini courses.