According to the WHO, it’s globally estimated that over 1.3 billion people are living with vision impairment. This calls for the need to design your eLearning course to be disability-friendly.
Therefore, to make your eLearning course highly accessible to everyone irrespective of their challenges, you should consider the following ways.
1. Make sure your eLearning course is disability-friendly
Of course, not all disabilities are clear to see. Except you are very close to such individuals or he/she discloses it, it can be hard to identify some disabilities. That’s why you need to consider these individuals while designing your eLearning course.
There are several ways that you can consider people with one or more defects. Take for instance:
- For Visually impaired users, provide Audio support for all text on screen, provide keyboard navigation rather than mouse clicks, and provide Zoom feature.
- Create transcripts and alternative text for each content item on screen.
- For audio files, making it very clear and audible
2. Make your content easy and clear to navigate
Another way to design an accessible eLearning course is to ensure that your content can easily be navigated. Instead of using “click here”, you can use the button tab which clearly states “NEXT”. That’ll go a long way in helping the visually impaired people interested in your eLearning course.
Design your video in such a way that your learners can control easily. For example it’s much easier and faster to use space-bars on the keyboard to pause/play a video than clicking the mouse.
3. Put flexibility in place in your design
Making your content flexible is a way of creating accessible eLearning that caters to everybody’s needs. With automated authoring tools like Wizcabin you can do that by providing your learners with multiple content formats.
Considering the visually impaired people, you can make your learning management system (LMS) flexible by using the zoom features. These allow them to zoom contents easily to have a clear view of the information in the contents.
Another way to make content flexible is to provide a help desk for your learners. This is to enable your learners to ask questions when they need any form of clarification concerning your course.
4. Use colors where necessary
Too low or too high color contrast can cause strains to the eyes. While trying to include colors in your content, remember there are people who are living with color-blindness.
Therefore, to be on the safer side, you should avoid over-usage of colors in your contents. Only add a few colors at the appropriate place in your course content to increase usability.
There are some color mixtures that result in high contrast colors that are very bad for the eyes. For instance, if you have a background color of black, to avoid high contrast color, a grey text is preferable than white text.
5. Write for a middle-school reading level
Writing in a middle-school reading level is a general writing practice. Not every one of your target audience or learners are native speakers. Some might have learned English as a second language.
Therefore, writing above this level may result in you creating content that people might not find enjoyable to read. Avoid using exclamation marks when you are passing instructions, it makes the learner feel you’re shouting at them.
6. Imagine YOURSELF as a LEARNER
The basic reason why you should imagine yourself as a learner is to be sure that you created an accessible eLearning. Ask yourself many questions like;
- Can I follow the instructions in the content?
- Is the reading level a middle school or a high-level of writing?
These and many more are the questions you should ask yourself so as to be sure that your course is accessible.
Accessible eLearning course design helps L&D professionals to provide eLearning that enables everyone to have a complete experience of your training. Consider the tips above to increase the usability of your eLearning course.
