Making eLearning Accessible

Client: Personal Project
Made with: Articulate Storyline
Time in Development: 12 hours
Collaborators: Solo-Project

Background:

The laws requiring websites and online training to be accessible have become more clearly defined. However, many clients are not aware of these laws and the need to have training materials that are accessible to people with disabilities. I developed this micro-learning to inform clients of the laws regarding accessibility and explain what it means to create accessible training. Since this was a personal project, I was constrained to one week to research and build the course and no budget.

Solution Developed:

The goal of the project was to create a short piece of training to educate clients on the need to develop eLearning/online content that was accessible to people with disabilities. With the constraint of having one week to complete it, I chose Articulate Storyline to produce the course. With Storyline’s rapid development features, I knew I could meet the required timeline by building the course in Storyline. I also decided to use minimal voice-over and use the text-to-speech option in Storyline to generate the audio.

With the audience, overall topic, and delivery mode settled, I began defining the learning objectives. What did we want our audience to learn from this training? Since there were four objectives defined for the course, I chose a simple branching format that used a menu with four options and one screen for each section.

As I researched the topic, it became clear that there was enough information for an extensive course on accessibility. I had to focus on “what did they need to know” vs. “what did I WANT them to know.” I distilled the necessary information to one screen for each section and added links to sites with more in-depth content.

Results:

The final product is a 10-minute micro-learning course hosted on this site. Clients will now better understand the laws governing accessibility and the possible consequences of not providing accessible content.

One realization during development was the difficulty of writing short, concise content that delivered the required message.