What a great treat to receive a review copy of Susi Miller’s new book! This updated edition of her wonderful Designing Accessible Learning Content: A Practical Guide to Applying Best Practice Accessibility Standards to L&D Resources (2nd edition) is a must-have for anyone trying to make sense of accessibility standards. Updates in this new version include a deep dive into the revised WCAG 2.2 standards, affordances of and concerns about the evolution of AI, and information about the new European Accessibility Act, which puts pressure on commercial endeavors as well as public sector entities to ensure good accessibility practices.

One of the things I enjoy most about Miller’s approach is her understanding that in struggling to get this right we are often dealing with guidelines rather than carved-in-stone rules, shifting as technology changes. Despite the extensive standards, we still sometimes work in murky areas: She acknowledges that interpretation of the standards is sometimes subjective. I always value practical and pragmatic over theoretical and conjecture and especially appreciate Miller's L&D focus on improving learning experiences—including those that go beyond “courses”—rather than just generating web content.
In addition to her discussion of standards, Miller shines when discussing disability. Case studies and statistics support the cases she makes—ethical, legal, business, and learning—for digital accessibility. Too, she shines light on designing for different access needs—cognitive, speech, hearing, vision, and motor and assistive technologies.
The book is, on the one hand, highly technical, offering in-depth specifics around WCAG 2.2 levels A and AA, as well as a look at the best-but-perhaps-not-always-achievable AAA level, and includes detail particular to popular authoring tools like Storyline and Captivate. But her deep understanding of disability elevates this work beyond a technical manual, opening a valuable window into why we should care about this in the first place. Her interest is especially poignant in this new edition, as Miller shares insight from her own journey since being diagnosed as dyslexic. This empathy extends to her readers as well. If there is a single quality attached to Miller's work—a tone, if you will—it is the sense that she sincerely wants to help. Her purpose is not just to enforce rules but, as she says, to assist practitioners in untangling the complexities of guidelines and becoming “more confident.”
Miller again does a wonderful job demystifying and simplifying the daunting standards for designing web-based content and conveying the idea that we need to move toward building accessible content as our default, not exception. We will continue reaching for this goal with every new tool and technology; with her help, we can step up to it. As she puts it, “Accessibility is a journey, not a destination.”
Image credit: Kobus Louw