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Accessibility in Course Creation

Two people climbing two ladders. One with rungs close and the other with rungs far apart.
Small Steps Toward Accessibility get you there faster.

 How can you possibly take all your potential learners' needs into account? 

You can’t. There’s no way to ensure you’re accessible to everyone without also driving yourself down a steady (potentially fast) path to burnout. 


However, you can approach accessibility and learner needs in very targeted ways that will give choices and help most of your learners - leaving you time to lift up those few whose needs you couldn’t account for. 


Before we dive in, let’s be clear: don’t try to do all this at once. It’s ok to start small and build in more consideration for learner needs as you go. 


Accessibility 101.


Accessible is a huge word. One of my favorite resources for thinking about accessibility is from W3 because it’s practical and defines access broadly. It can be overwhelming though. So I do recommend starting small with more traditional forms of accessibility, like captions or transcripts or audio. This creates multiple pathways to the content. Make it a habit; figure out a process, and then we can do a lot moving on from there. 


Remember, it’s about making it accessible, and making it accessible in the traditional sense of the word can go a long way to making it accessible for everyone. This isn’t about complying with laws (in the US we’ve got the good old ADA), but about creating real access for real people. 


For example, if you’re going to create a video or an audio clip, create a transcript (for the video it becomes your captions, for the audio it becomes a way for the deaf/hard of hearing to still take in your content). Then, you make it accessible for everyone. Share that transcript and those who need it AND those who prefer it have increased access. Please, for the love of all things right in the world, don’t use auto captions. They suck. Want some ideas for free captions? Just ask. 


If your content is largely written, use an AI text to speech to create an audio version. This makes it accessible to those who have visual impairments, a learning disability around reading, AND busy parents who can’t take the time to read but can listen during school drop off. Again, happy to suggest scrappy not crappy options. 


Visuals need alt text and check out color schemes that are friendly to the color blind. You can check out this Harvard produced guide for considering colorblindness. 


These are all basic accessibility steps that help more than just those who need the accommodation.


Make yourself familiar with the concept of plain language writing. One of my favorite examples to showcase how important this is is on The Pudding, and there’s a ton of info on plain language.gov. Writing in plain language creates accessibility for those that don’t speak your language as their first language, for those who are neuro-spicy, and for those with different cultural backgrounds.


Knowledge about your learners.


Get to know them. What matters to them? Why are they coming to you? What are their lives like? This isn’t so you can market to them (it might also help with that), but so you can create a course that has content and activities that will fit into their lives to help them achieve what they’re coming to you to achieve. 


If you’re creating a course on getting out into nature more, don’t create your content as a video, or written, make it something they can download and listen to. Don’t ask them to fill out a workbook to engage with that content or apply it. Have them engage by taking photos of the cool hikes they went on and doing a voice reflection. 


If you’re creating a course for busy parents, don’t make it text based. If they’re busy they don’t have time to read your blog or watch your videos. Create an audio file or a quick to digest infographic. Don’t ask them to engage by printing something out - instead of printing out a time tracker to figure out where they can cut the crap from their calendar, suggest a good digital tracker so they can track shit with the click of a button.


If you’re trying to teach someone a new skill, then you’d better have videos walking them through steps AND written instructions. Don’t assume everyone has time or needs the video, but also remember that some will. Know how much they know so you’re not giving them steps they don’t need (I don’t need to know the basics of a Google doc if I signed up for advanced template making with Google docs). 


Who they are and why they’re coming to you matters. Find out. Don’t ask “what’s your life like?” ask “how do you learn best?” “how do you fit in time for learning?” Which leads us to…


Know what their baggage looks like.


This deserves to be an entire category, even though it fits under Knowledge about your learners. That umbrella is an understanding of what their day to day lives are like so they can complete your course. This one is understanding the experiences they’ve already had that will color their experiences you’ve built for them. 


Jump back to my blog post about good learning experiences for a more in depth why and some ways to do it. Then remember that you can’t account for every shape, size, and condition that baggage will be. 


And that’s ok. As you iterate, and you should be iterating, you’ll be able to take more into account; you’ll know your learners better; you’ll know if they all have the same sticker, the same frayed edge, the same dent. Then you accommodate it. 


What about those that don’t fit? When you build a course to be accessible for most, then the labor of supporting becomes less for you. Those that have weird wheels or a chip in the handle can take advantage of custom support and you’ll have the energy for it because you’ve already accounted for everyone else. 
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