Accessibility from the Ground Up: Remove Barriers to eLearning Content

“Accessible eLearning Benefits All Learners” explores the reasons for creatingaccessible eLearning content. This Spotlight continues a four-part series onhow to remove different types of barriers that learners might face:

• “Accessibility from the Ground Up: Build Captions and Usable Design into All eLearning” describesaccessibility for learners who are deaf or hard of hearing.
• “Accessibility from the Ground Up: Without Glasses, You Couldn’t Read This Content” addresseslearners with visual disabilities.

Here, we move to the “O” of POUR,creating content that is operableusing standard input devices. This is not a simple goal!  

Ensuring that all eLearning is operable is of utmostimportance to learners with motor disabilities. Learners with some motordisabilities, as well as blind learners, cannot use a mouse or touch screen. Thusa basic tenet of operable content is ensuring that content is keyboardaccessible; if all controls and interactive elements have keyboard equivalents,the content will work with most adaptive devices, including screen readers, mouthsticks, and head wands, which use or replicate keyboard functionality.

Motor disabilities range from mild shaking of the hands toquadriplegia. No two individuals have identical disabilities, and no singleaccessibility feature can address all mobility issues. However, as with visualdisabilities, learners with mobility impairments benefit greatly from screenreading technology, use of voice commands, and support for adaptivetechnologies, particularly input devices. The growing sophistication andubiquity of voice recognition software is a tremendous boon to people withlimited mobility or vision.

With Apple’s “Hey Siri” feature, for example, “It’scompletely hands-free. For someone who’s a quad, that is an amazing thing,being able to have the phone go from being ‘asleep’ to working. And you can useSiri to make calls, so you can say, ‘Hey Siri, call 911’ and Siri will call.That’s really life-changing for a lot of people,” said Dmitri Belser, executivedirector of the Center for Accessible Technology (C for AT) in Berkeley, California.

Not everyone can use voice controls, though, just as noteveryone can manipulate a mouse.

Jordan, whom we met in “Accessible eLearning Benefits AllLearners,” has trouble getting voice recognition software to understand her.She’s not alone; many disabilities affect a learner’s voice, making theirspeech very soft or hard to understand. This challenge, combined with handtremors that make using a mouse or even hitting the correct keys difficult,means that learners like Jordan find it exhausting to access complicated pagesthat require lots of scrolling or have closely spaced form fields.

The average web page is anobstacle course

Common design elements cancreate a navigational nightmare for learners. Design strategies and WCAG 2.0guidelines that improve access for people with motor disabilities or who lackcomputer savvy include:

• Remove timed elements or allow users to controlor reset them.
• Providealternatives, such as keyboard equivalents, for exercises that require learnersto drag and drop content or select precise areas of the screen.
• When learners have difficulty using a mouse orkeyboard or use alternative control devices, they might become fatigued easily;allow users to skip over lengthy lists or text blocks or repetitive content. (See“Ten Ways to Create Useful Hyperlinks” for information on “skip” links.)
• Build in navigation aids like site maps, searchfeatures, and indexes so that learners can find needed content easily and skipirrelevant content.
• Allow learners to limit the amount of content ornumber of options that appear on a screen.
• Avoid automatic moving, blinking, or scrollingcontent, or provide learners a way to pause or stop the movement. Do not useany elements that flash more than three times per second; this can triggerseizures in some people.
• Ask for confirmation before executing serioussteps. For example, if someone has difficulty controlling a mouse or keyboardand they click on a delete or reset button by mistake, the eLearning moduleshould make recovery from that error very easy.
• If adjacent keys on a small screen, such as amobile device, have very different functions, allow users to shift somefunctions to different keys or do those tasks another way. When sending emailfrom some phones, it’s far too easy to erase or delete a message with no ideaof how to get it back.
• Design eLearning to be forgiving of errors sothat learners do not become frustrated or fail simply because a hand tremorcaused them to click on an incorrect response.
• All eLearning content should include clear,easy-to-find instructions, including where learners can turn forproblem-solving help.
• Don’t assume any technical knowledge, particularlywith eLearning webinars and other modules that require learners to get to awebsite and ensure that speakers or microphones are working; provide clearinstructions.

“I think that the biggest thing you can do to make eLearningaccessible to the broadest number of people possible would be to have the mostdetailed set of instructions possible,” Belser said. “The assumptions abouttechnology are one of the biggest barriers.”

Locked out

Ease of use and access affects all learners. Even when theeLearning itself works well with voice commands and screen readers, learners mightbe locked out by a “captcha”—the increasingly ubiquitous boxes on websiteswhere learners are asked to verify that they are not robots. Ostensibly therefor security, they are often unnecessary for eLearning and simply addbarriers. 

“Are a lot of people signing in to your eLearning site bymistake?” Belser muses. “With eLearning, you’ll get one person who has asubscription and 40 people will use it,” but captcha tests don’t solve thatproblem. “I don’t think that stuff gets thought about enough. What is reallythe risk? In eLearning, yes, if you are doing a test, you want to verify thatthe person taking the test is really the person who should be taking the test.But if you are doing an online webinar, do you really care who’s there? Ifpeople are interested in being there, you kind of want them there,” Belsersaid.