5 Accessibility Tips for Online Learning

Want to improve accessibility in your training sessions?

Or make your eLearning offering more effective for all your employees?

Look no further: Jackafal is here with some handy tips to get you on the road to accessible content. This list is not exhaustive, but starting with these five handy tips will get you well on the way to improving your online learning accessibility.

1. Words and Sound

If you’re including videos in your content, you can make them more accessible by making sure there are audio and visual cues: turn the sound on, and put on the closed captions option. For live sessions, a lot of video platforms such as Zoom and Teams even have the option to live caption what the speaker is saying, which can be a great feature to point out to your attendees. Ensuring you’ve got words and sound wherever possible means your content is more accessible to blind and deaf learners, and also those who may have additional needs in processing spoken or written information.

This is also a great tip for social media videos and adverts, both for accessibility and for improving engagement. Did you know that 50% of consumers regularly watch social media videos with the sound off? So improving accessibility with words and sound also improves your marketing reach: win-win.

2. Visuals

While flashy animations and busy slides can be engaging for some people, for other learners they can be difficult to process. This can sometimes be even harder for neurodivergent people with autism, dyslexia and ADHD, who may process visual information in a different way.

Some ways to make your visuals more accessible are to:

• Make sure the background contrasts nicely with your font

• Check your text is a decent size, easy-to-read font and colour

• Avoid overly quick or flashy animations unless absolutely necessary

• Stick to the essential information on the slides

To paraphrase that infamous scene in Peep Show, “if you can't sum up all the aims in a few bullet points, then your aims are too diffuse.” And if they’re too diffuse? Nobody is going to find it easy to understand or remember, let alone those who have additional learning needs.

3. Preparing Attendees

If you’re running a live session and there are large passages of information or tons of visually complex diagrams, it can be really useful to send materials to attendees in advance. These might be the slides themselves, or a supplementary sheet with the more in-depth information sections. Depending on the scale of the event, you could choose to e-mail these, or make them freely available on the event page for people to download.

Allowing people to look at the more information-heavy sections of your session in advance will help people with additional learning needs such as dyslexia and dyspraxia to process the information before the day, and anyone who requires a screen-reader to acquainted with any images or diagrams.

Extra tip: PDFs can sometimes cause issues with accessibility for screen-readers, so there are extra steps to take if you’re planning to use PDFs for this purpose.

4. Alt Texts

Alt texts are really important in allowing people with screen readers to be able to ‘see’ and understand visual information like images, charts or graphs. They are descriptions of exactly what the image shows, or what information it is trying to share, depending on which is more important in the context.

Whether your material is on a Learning Management System (LMS), sent out in advance, or distributed to be used during the session, you will need to have alt texts to be accessible. The good news is that alt texts on your website and social media are also invaluable for improving your SEO, so getting used to writing good quality alt texts will do wonders for your marketing as well as your accessibility.

5. Learning Styles

Accessibility is about making learning as accessible as possible for everyone, and that doesn’t just have to mean those with a disability or additional learning need. Making sure that the design of your session includes a variety of information styles, exercises and resources will help. Some questions you can ask yourself are:

• Does the session use a mix of words, and pictures, graphs or charts to explain your points?

• Are there opportunities to use skills practically and get stuck in, as well as listening and making notes?

• Are the exercises clear and reasonable in the timeframe for all kinds of learner?

• How long is your session? Does it provide breaks for those who learn in short bursts?

• Are there worksheets for learners to review after the session and consolidate their learning if needed?

Having a tolerance in your session for everyone to learn in their own way will lead to better results, as learners will be more engaged, take more information on board, and a wider variety of people will be able to take something valuable away from your session.

If you are interested to learn more about improving accessibility for your online learning, or want to see some examples of how we’ve helped organisations in the past, why not get in touch with us for a free consultation? We always love to chat to new people, and we’d be happy to talk to you about your learning & development and EDI needs.