Technology is amazing! It allows us to communicate and share knowledge with people all across the globe. We are instructors, programmers, and designers leveraging technology to make our content available on a wider scale than ever before. It is our duty to ensure that knowledge is delivered clearly and concisely, to and for everyone. How do we adequately accommodate users who face disabilities? Unfortunately, WCAG and Section 508 guidelines do not provide instruction to tell us exactly HOW to do this. The standards are often vague, confusing, difficult to follow, and are not tool specific. This often leads to haphazard solutions or an incorrect interpretation of standards. So how do we navigate in this tough environment?

Accessible eLearning is becoming a vital aspect of a well-rounded diversity strategy for government, corporations, and education institutions. While this session will place a heavier focus on practicality and implementation. We all know "what" the standards are and "why" we use them, so this session focuses on "how" we implement them in development tools. You will follow step-by-step instructions, hints and tips, and best practices to help you in designing and developing with accessibility standards. You will leverage the features of dominKnow | ONE, Lectora, and Storyline to design, develop, and test your eLearning courses for compliance. You will learn what makes good alt text descriptions and how to add them, and how to handle multimedia, including transcripts, open/closed captioning, and descriptive audio. You will learn about focus and focus order and how to adjust it where applicable, how to test for sufficient color contrast, and how to test for compliance using DHS Trusted Tester tools. You will learn what items comprise a strong accessibility checklist that can be used by developers on your team. In the end, you'll be able to produce accessible courses that are robust, interactive, and media-rich.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to produce accessible courses that are robust, interactive, and media rich
• How to leverage the features of dominKnow | ONE, Lectora, and Storyline to design and develop your eLearning courses for compliance
• What accessibility is and what it means in the context of eLearning
• The design concepts, techniques, and strategies that are considered in the creation of accessible eLearning
• Strategies for addressing WCAG and Section 508 accessibility standards
• How to review and test your eLearning courses for compliance
• The difference between compliance and usability

Technology discussed in this session:

dominKnow | ONE, Lectora, Articulate Storyline

Participant technology requirements:

Laptop loaded with your preferred authoring tool. We will be covering specific examples with dominKnow | ONE, Lectora, and Storyline (trial copies of the software are okay). Asset files, supplied in advance, should be preloaded.