Is Your Workplace Learning Adapted for Accessibility and Inclusivity?
Marbral Advisory’s Change and Learning Architect, Irene Gaydon, designs and delivers our suite of e-learning and bespoke courses for clients. She has extensive experience designing materials that meet the specific needs of learners, ensuring they are designed to be both inclusive and accessible. She challenges clients to explore whether their training is suitable for people with differing visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, or neurological abilities.
In developing bespoke training content for Marbral Advisory and our clients, we place a strong emphasis on inclusivity, ensuring that the experience caters to the varied and specific needs of learners.
The content is meticulously curated. Our process begins with a detailed analysis of the skills and knowledge our learners need. This is then followed by the development of clear and attainable learning objectives. To address accessibility, we adhere to best practice online accessibility standards and guidelines, ensuring that the material is inclusive, accessible, and understandable for everyone.
Ensuring Engagement
We incorporate real-world examples and activities to keep everyone engaged and actively employ a mix of methods, including knowledge checks and hands-on exercises, to make learning enjoyable and effective for all, regardless of learning style.
We regularly review, update, and improve on our online training material, based on user feedback, industry changes, accessibility standards and guidelines. We strive to deliver meaningful and individualised training that fosters growth and success, upholding inclusivity, and accessibility.
Web Accessibility Standards
While web accessibility standards and guidelines are often understood and implemented by website developers, these same standards may not always be considered by online course developers and Instructional Designers. Despite widespread adoption of online learning, many online courses are simply not accessible for people with disabilities. These include Visual, Auditory, Physical, Speech, Cognitive, and Neurological Disabilities.
Vision loss includes a range of conditions including near-sightedness, farsightedness, age-related difficulties, a variety of colour-blind conditions, to complete loss of sight. Individuals with a vision impairment often face the most significant barriers in accessing online content, given its visual nature. Any visual element with meaning must have alternate text or an audio equivalent to accommodate this group of learners.
Using Screen Readers
Other considerations to keep in mind when designing accessible e-learning for learners with vision loss include testing content by using a screen reader, ensuring the course can be navigated when the screen is resized and can be navigated by using a keyboard rather than a mouse. Keyboard use and responsive design is also more friendly for those with physical impairments, who may be challenged by the more interactive elements of e-learning and is becoming more and more important as tablets and phones don’t use a mouse either.
While learners with hearing loss will typically experience fewer barriers in accessing online content, multimedia and audio content can present barriers where alternatives such as closed captions or transcripts are not provided.
Giving Learners Control
Learners with cognitive or learning impairments may face challenges regarding concentration, making decisions, remembering, or learning new things. When designing online learning it is important to ensure the message is as straight forward as possible. It is also important that the learner can control the speed and pace of the course, the content is easy to understand, problems are easy to solve, information is easy to recall, tasks are doable, there are no time restrictions, and the reading level is appropriate for the audience.
We regularly review and update our e-learning. When we evaluate an online course, we often talk about empathy and usability. Usability refers to the user’s experience of the course, and determining if the learner can accomplish what they set out to do in the course without any barriers. This includes asking: What will they see first? How will they know what to do next? Can you follow your instructions? Can you navigate the screen with a screen reader? Is the course keyboard friendly?
Making learning more accessible for all users is not a nice to have, by meeting the legislative standards we can ensure we develop barrier-free, robust, and accessible e-learning for everyone.
If you would like to discuss your E-learning, Micro-learning, Virtual Classroom, or Face to Face Training, please get in touch with Irene: irene.gaydon@marbraladvisory.com or find out more in our website training section.
