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How to make your elearning accessible

It's not only important and fair - it's also a legal requirement that your elearning resources can be accessed and understood by all of your students. Your learners may come from diverse cultural and language backgrounds, be a wide variety of ages and may have physical or cognitive disabilities such as poor or no vision and hearing.

Luckily it's not difficult to make elearning content or websites accessible. Adhering to accessibility standards (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)), avoiding assumptions about your learners and plain common sense will be your best tools to do so.

Our top tips for designing and developing accessible elearning content:

Write accessible elearning course content

  • Avoid jargon and complicated vocabulary
  • Keep sentences simple and clear, without 'dumbing down' the content
  • Make sure the elearning content flows in a cohesive way
  • Provide visual alternatives to text content, especially for learners with autism

Design accessible elearning course content

  • Ensure colour contrasts do not limit what some of your learners can see
  • Ensure that all information conveyed with colour is also available without colour
  • Make sure that navigation is clear
  • Avoid using ‘click here’ for hyperlink text: be more descriptive
  • Consider using groups to provide personalised content for learner groups with differing abilities
  • Do not use flickering content as this may cause seizures
  • Use ALT tags to describe each image, imagemap, diagram or graph
  • Provide captions or transcripts for multimedia elements such as video or audio

Design accessible elearning interactions

  • Avoid complex interactions or provide an alternative if doing so
  • Avoid elearning activities with time restrictions

Develop accessible elearning course content

  • Make sure font sizes are large enough for those with low vision to see
  • Make sure navigation is clear and easy to find and access
  • Avoid drop-down menus otherwise screen readers may interpret them as one object
  • Use HTML heading tags to organise your elearning content
  • Make sure any multimedia elements such as video or audio can be paused so that learners can go at their own pace
  • Use responsive design to make sure your elearning content is accessible on mobile devices
  • For data tables, identify row and column headers

 

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