Building Accessibility into Your eLearning Platform from Day One
Creating an eLearning platform is an exciting endeavour, but one aspect often overlooked is accessibility. By ensuring your platform is accessible from day one, you make your content available to everyone, including individuals with disabilities. This forward-thinking approach benefits not only your learners but also your business in the long run.
Let's explore how accessibility can be integrated into your platform from the very start, with real-world examples to bring these ideas to life.
Why Accessibility Matters
Accessibility in digital platforms means removing barriers that might prevent people with disabilities from engaging with your content. Imagine setting up a new library but only installing stairs at the entrance. While it’s accessible to many, those using wheelchairs would find it impossible to enter. Similarly, a poorly designed e-learning platform can exclude learners with visual, auditory, or cognitive impairments. Ensuring that everyone can participate from the outset is crucial to promoting inclusivity.
A famous example of this approach is seen in Apple's early investment in voiceover technology for their devices (macOS Tiger in 2005). By building accessibility features and including them from the start, they ensured that visually impaired users could interact with the same products as everyone else. This created a more inclusive user base and helped position Apple as a leader in accessible technology.
Designing for All Learners
When designing your eLearning platform, it’s essential to think about the variety of learners you’ll be reaching. These learners could range from someone who is hard of hearing to someone who struggles with complex text or navigation.
For instance, including captions in all video content allows learners who are deaf or hard of hearing to still engage fully. This is a simple step but makes an enormous difference. Consider YouTube, which automatically generates captions for videos. Although not always perfect, it demonstrates how accessible content can be available to all users, regardless of their hearing ability. By adding the option for manual captions, eLearning platforms can further improve the accuracy and accessibility of their content.
Accessible Visual Content
Many learners benefit from visual content, such as images, charts, and videos. But visual media can pose a problem for users with visual impairments. To ensure they aren’t left behind, consider implementing features such as alt text for images. Alt text provides a written description of an image, allowing screen readers to convey this information to users.
An everyday example of alt text in action is seen on social media platforms like Instagram. When you scroll past an image, screen reader software can describe it, ensuring visually impaired users can still participate. Similarly, on an e-learning platform, describing diagrams, charts, or even more complex visuals ensures that learners with visual impairments gain the same understanding as those who can see the images.
Ensuring Easy Navigation
A crucial element of any eLearning platform is its navigation. Imagine trying to use a website where all the links are hidden behind layers of confusing menus. Frustrating, much? Poorly designed navigation is one of the most significant barriers that users with disabilities face.
For example, a screen reader user may rely on keyboard navigation rather than a mouse. If your platform isn’t optimised for keyboard use, these learners will struggle to interact with it. Platforms like Google Docs have built-in keyboard shortcuts, which allow users to navigate without a mouse, creating a smoother experience for those with physical or visual impairments. Following such practices ensures that your eLearning platform remains accessible to all learners, regardless of their abilities.
Accessible from the Start
Building accessibility into your platform from the start means fewer costly revisions later. Retrofitting accessibility is often more challenging and expensive, and these considerations should not be an afterthought. Consider the example of websites that had to comply with legal requirements, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) or the UK Equality Act (2010). Many had to redesign their entire platforms to accommodate users with disabilities. Had accessibility been a priority from the beginning, they could have avoided such substantial changes.
By planning for accessibility early, you can ensure the lasting relevance of your platform and avoid the risk of excluding learners. Netflix, for example, started adding optional subtitles to all its content to cater to a growing global audience. This enhanced usability for deaf viewers and made the platform more available to those watching in different languages — a case of accessibility benefitting all users.
Conclusion
Making your eLearning platform accessible from day one ensures it can be used by the widest possible audience. Whether through captions, alt text, or simple navigation, these small changes have a huge impact. Remember, just like physical spaces, digital platforms need to be designed with everyone in mind. By building accessibility into your platform, you’re not just complying with standards; you’re creating an inclusive environment where all learners can thrive.
Your platform can set a new standard in eLearning, just like Apple's voiceover technology or Google Docs’ keyboard navigation. Making it accessible from the beginning is not only the right thing to do but also the smart choice for future growth.
