Accessibility Isn’t Optional: Tips for Inclusive Design
Online Events Archive
Pushing the eLearning Envelope Online Conference 2021 - June 10, 2021

Haley Shust
Lead Instructional Designer
Learning Ninjas®
There's a common misconception that accessibility only means designing for people with disabilities or impairments, such as hearing loss, vision impairment, or seizure-risk. While those populations are certainly included in 508, ADA, and WCAG standards, there’s much more to consider when it comes to inclusive design. As well, we in the eLearning community shouldn't rely on stakeholder requests for text-to-speech, closed captions, or alt text in order to include them in our work. Accessibility is a natural part of the instructional design process, not an add-on or an afterthought, and so including accessibility features should become a part of all the projects we work on, not just some.
In this session you'll discover how to make designing for inclusion and accessibility easier and more instinctive. We’ll explore several examples of inaccessible designs and recommend tools and resources that can help test the accessibility of your own designs. Then, we’ll review some inclusive design principles you can use to improve your eLearning and examine how to optimize your work for accessibility.
By the end of this session, we hope you will:
- Discover why accessibility is a requirement and not a nice-to-have
- Optimize your designs for accessibility
- Use accessibility tools and resources to make your designs more inclusive
- Prioritize accessibility in your instructional design process
Handout(s)
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Session Video
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