Is your elearning AODA accessible?
The goal of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) is to make our province accessible to all persons with disabilities by 2025. More companies are ramping up initiatives to build accessibility into their infrastructure, practices, and training to meet this deadline.
This means you have to keep in mind when designing elearning courses and activities, that impaired learners should be able to complete the same elearning and achieve the same objectives as fully-abled learners. Assistive technologies such as screen readers can help learners to access the content, but it is also important that your course is compatible with these if you want them to be accessible. Put yourself in the position of someone using these aids to interact with your elearning.
Here are some tips to help make your elearning better for everyone to use when building elearning in Storyline.
Minimize the number of tab-interactable objects on screen. Turn off the tab interactivity of unnecessary objects. Check out our other blogs on advanced tabbing customization to make navigation as smooth as possible for keyboard-only learners.
Where possible, keep colour contrasts in mind with regard to the different types of colour blindness that some of your learners might have. You can check whether your text and background colours are accessible with these websites: http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/, or https://snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html. Simply enter the hex colour codes for your text and background, and the sites will let you know if the combination is accessible or not.
Make alt text to describe images and include instructions for selectable objects.
Have closed captions for all audio, include the audio script in the module, or as an attached document.
Avoid interactions that require use of the mouse (e.g.: drag and drop activities)
Make sure that navigation is clear. Use ‘select’ instead of ‘click’ for objects to be clicked on. Be descriptive and provide as much detail as possible.
Choose large, easy to read fonts. Sans serif fonts are friendlier for learners with dyslexia.
If you want to ensure that all of your learners, abled or otherwise, will be able have their training needs met, contact us today at info@pathwaysinc.ca!
