Why You Should Consider Accessibility When Creating eLearning

Accessibility is the design of products, devices, services, and environments for people with disabilities. For digital content, you must frequently design for limitations relating to vision, hearing, mobility, or cognition. Ensuring that eLearning is accessible is required, in some situations, by law. For example, if training is created for a federal agency, it’s covered by Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. Most states have similar accessibility requirements for training designed for them. Whether the ADA applies to commercial businesses is a bit more nuanced depending on multiple factors such as the business’s location and type of customer.

Does your company have an accessibility policy that applies to learning development? #a11y #accessibility

— E-Learning Council (@learningcouncil) November 29, 2016

Along the same line as their popular Section 508 Checklist, WebAIM has just published a WCAG 2.0 Checklist.

This is intended to be an easy-to-use, understandable checklist for evaluating or implementing WCAG 2.0–a standard for creating accessible websites (and eLearning). The language in the checklist is significantly simplified from the actual WCAG 2.0 language published by the W3C. While the complexity of the language in WCAG 2.0 is, in my opinion, mostly necessary to ensure that it is independently verifiable and technology agnostic, it does pose difficulties – particularly for those new to accessibility. This checklist should make implementing WCAG 2.0 much easier.

Check out the WCAG 2.0 checklist at http://webaim.org/standards/wcag/checklist.

via WebAim