Accessibility Makeovers in E-Learning #417

Accessibility Makeovers in E-Learning #417: Challenge | Recap

As course designers, it's important to keep accessibility standards in mind right from the beginning of the design process.  Accessibility should be a key consideration throughout every stage of course development.

But what if you're working on legacy projects that may not have been designed with accessibility in mind? Or you're a newcomer to e-learning and just learning what your authoring apps can do? Or even if you're an experienced course designer who hasn't had much exposure to accessibility requirements before? Regardless of where you and your team are in your accessibility journey, there are resources, tools, guidelines, and a supportive community to help along the way.

Remember, accessibility isn't just about complying with guidelines and regulations - it's about making education accessible to everyone. And that’s what this week’s challenge is all about!

Challenge of the Week

This week, your challenge is to rework a short project to make it more accessible. You can choose a single-slide interaction or a series of slides for your demo. If you don’t want to use your own projects, grab some slides from Content Library or our downloads hub. The goal this week is to practice building more accessible courses.

Bonus

First, THANK YOU for writing overviews of your AI-inspired examples last week. Those were super helpful. I included your descriptions in the recap post to help viewers better understand the tools and techniques you used.

To help others understand your approach, please share some insights into your design choices. For example, what features did you use? What challenges did you encounter? 

Resources

Looking for more information on designing accessible e-learning? The following resources are chock full of practical tips for getting started with the accessible features in Storyline 360 and Rise 360.

Webinars

Articles

For even more on accessibility in e-learning, you can find all our best content in this series:

User Guides

Share Your E-Learning Work

  • Comments: Use the comments section below to link your published example and blog post.
  • Forums: Start a new thread and share a link to your published example.
  • Personal blog: If you have a blog, please consider writing about your challenges. We'll link to your posts so your great work gets even more exposure.
  • Social media: If you share your demos on Twitter or LinkedIn, try using #ELHChallenge so your tweeps can follow your e-learning coolness.

Last Week’s Challenge:

Before you get started on your makeovers, check out the creative ways course designers are using AI to help them build better e-learning:

30 Ways Course Designers are Using AI in E-Learning #416

Using AI in E-Learning RECAP #416: Challenge | Recap

New to the E-Learning Challenges?

The weekly e-learning challenges are ongoing opportunities to learn, share, and build your e-learning portfolios. You can jump into any or all of the previous challenges anytime you want. I’ll update the recap posts to include your demos.

Learn more about the challenges in this Q&A post and why and how to participate in this helpful article

Next Week’s Challenge & Webinar

  • Next week's challenge #418 (May 26): Motion Graphics and Animated Intros for E-Learning. 

Got an idea for a challenge? Are you interested in doing a webinar showcasing how you made one or more challenge demos? Or do you have some comments for your humble challenge host? Use this anonymous form to share your feedback:  https://bit.ly/ElearningChallengeForm.

45 Comments
Jonathan Hill
Thierry EMMANUEL

Bonjour Heroes. For a module that had to be accessible to learners with motor difficulties, and therefore entirely usable with keyboard navigation, a client asked me to propose interactive activities (quizzes) that could be used with the mouse as well as with the keyboard, so that there would be no difference. I worked on 2 drag-and-drop templates to show how it can be done, as they are a priori the most complicated activities to do without the mouse: a classic drag-and-drop and a reorganization activity (a little more difficult because there are several drop zones). The way I've found to do this is to use motion paths to "drag", and the "drag and drop" are actually hidden "True/False" and "Multiple Choice" activities. I finalized the demos and translated the explanations for this chall... Expand

Amar Kulshreshtha
Sarah Scott
Jackie Matuza

I've been trying to learn how to use MacOS VoiceOver in order to test out courses with a screen reader and that has been challenging but I've gotten the hang of it enough to start testing. I decided to update the element of a course that seemed the least accessible - a drag-and-drop interaction. I updated the interaction to be a "select one" option for each of the items that were previously dropped. I haven't loved using layers with the screen reader so I made each object/question it's own slide, but I don't know if that's entirely necessary. In my old version, the object being dropped was an image and descriptive text appeared when you hovered over it, which is also not accessible (or at least I couldn't figure out how to make it work well) so I changed the object being dropped to be a b... Expand

Yvonne Urra-Bazain
Yvonne Urra-Bazain
Amaly Gillig
Rhiannon Knowles

Hi everyone! This is my first challenge (& post) - I only discovered eLearning Heroes & started using Articulate this year, so I went for improving upon an existing Rise template. https://360.articulate.com/review/content/28f1049e-fbfe-4b94-8561-1ae1fa229dd3/review - I changed the headings/subheadings to sentence case (although I've been reading up on this and the literature is conflicting in terms of whether this is more readable/easier to process!). - I added timings in the first section for those not able to see the GIF, and enabled the option for users to zoom in on the GIF if they need to. - I also added audio for each section – I've noticed some of my favourite websites doing this more and more. :) I tried recording this myself but sadly I live next to a building site right n... Expand

Phezulu Dhlodhlo

Good day E-Learning heroes, This is my first effort at creating a course that is accessible. Its quite a huge challenge. I did a lot of reading on 508 Compliance, A11Y Project, accessibility and many other related resources. In this challenge, l concentrated on this basics. These basics included structuring text accordingly, customizing the SL360 player for accessibility, changing the focus order and changing certain interactions to make them accessible. I could have included some form validations but time was constraining and l also did not want to embed my forms as web objects. This is a work in progress for me. Yvonne Urra-Bazain you constantly inspire me with your accessible alt texts on your LinkedIn posts. Thank you and keep up the good work. https://360.articulate.c... Expand

Jill  Martine

I just wanted to share a quick slide that was inspired by Sarah Hodge’s excellent drag and drop template https://community.articulate.com/download/storyline-accessible-drag-and-drop-chat-interaction. I downloaded the template and modified it for our brand and to include 4 choices. In the course, each scenario includes 4 choices, some that are better than others. The learner can click, drag, or use tab/enter to make their selections, and then feedback displays. I’m trying to use the word ‘select’ over ‘click’ to account for various ways to interact. https://360.articulate.com/review/content/20533562-c3c3-42e4-9da6-a39d2877096c/review I kept color simple with black text on a white slide background and black on light orange answer choices (checked with WebAIM for color contrast with availa... Expand

Teresa Sowell
Jodi M. Sansone