You’ll find that almost every e-learning platform is 508-compliant, meaning that it is accessible and meets 508 guidelines. Essentially, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act states that any institution receiving federal funding, including schools and universities, must provide disabled users “access to information comparable to the access available to others.”1 Two notes of caution here. First, although a tool may be accessible, many of its features may not be. Often interactivity options like drag and drops are not compliant; neither are videos that don’t have captioning. Additionally, to make a tutorial accessible using most e-learning tools will require additional development. Articulate Storyline is 508-complaint, but you must individually add accessibility information to any element on the screen that conveys information. As a best practice, you should integrate this additional work into your workflow, and not treat it as something to add later in the development process. Second, these guidelines are the minimum that you should use in any tutorial. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are stricter than the 508 guidelines. For example, Section 508 and WCAG both call for captioning of audio content, but WCAG also calls for audio controls like the ability to stop, pause, and adjust the volume of audio.2 For a complete list of WCAG guidelines, see the General Services Administration’s “Guide to Accessible Web Design and Development.” Many of these guidelines may not be relevant to tutorials, so I have included here the most useful accessibility tips for tutorial development.
Guide to Accessible Web Design and Development
https://www.section508.gov/content/guide-accessible-web-design-development/
Some users may use a keyboard or a screen reader like JAWS to go through your tutorials. As a result, you must include text alternatives for any elements on the screen that need to be read by the screen reader. We are pretty familiar with alt tags for images but may not be so familiar with alt tags for buttons, multiple-choice questions, and boxes. Any element on the screen that is not purely decorative must have a tag that can be read by a screen reader.
Videos should have both closed-captioning and a video transcript. Including a transcript not only allows for the use of screen readers but also allows the learner to go at their own pace and choose how they would like to access the content. There are a number of free and paid captioning services. However, the free ones, like YouTube, tend to lack accuracy. Rev, a paid service that costs $1.50 per minute, claims to have a 99 percent accuracy rate.3 As a best practice, add captioning only when you are certain you will not be making any additional changes to the video. Learners should also be able to control the video and adjust the volume. Additionally, a video with sound should not start automatically, but rather the learner should choose when to start the video.
Rev
Users with visual impairments and those with motor skills disabilities may not be able to use a mouse or trackpad. Instead they use the tab key or space bar to move through a tutorial. The tab key will read any elements on the screen that have an alt tag. However, as part of the development process, you must decide in which order the tags will be read and also which elements do not need tags and will be ignored. Similarly, you will need to decide what to do about interactive options that cannot be used with a tab key or space bar, such as drag and drops, slides, and matching questions. You should either avoid these features or include an equivalent alternative.
Tables are a great way of organizing and presenting content. However, they are not automatically accessible. Individuals using screen readers do not automatically know that a table is present. To make tables accessible, you will need to add a description for the table, headers for rows and columns, and HTML markups for individual cells.
Designing for all means designing for a spectrum of vision disabilities from individuals with low vision to those with color blindness. Some color combinations may look good together from a design standpoint but may be difficult to see. Black and white has the highest contrast, but from a design point of view that combination is rather boring. The WCAG provides standards for minimum text and background contrast and ratings from AAA to Fail.4 For normal size text, you want to achieve an AA rating. You can easily check the contrast ratio of your text with the WebAIM Contrast Checker. On the topic of color, you don’t want color to be the only way that you communicate information. For example, if you have two buttons, a green one for Yes and a red one for No, you should also include the words Yes and No. In addition to words, you can also give the two buttons different shapes to further communicate information.
WebAIM Contrast Checker
https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/
Universal design differs from accessibility in that it is broader and not aimed solely for individuals with disabilities but rather for all individuals. Originally created by architect Ron Mace, universal design is “the concept of designing all products and the built environment to be aesthetic and usable to the greatest extent possible by everyone, regardless of their age, ability, or status in life.”5
The seven principles of universal design are
Some examples of designs that incorporate these principles are sidewalk curb cuts, doors that open automatically, scissors that can be easily used by right- and left-handed individuals, adjustable desks, and Ikea assembly instructions. So how is this all related to creating tutorials? Related to universal design and based on the science of how people learn, Universal Design for Learning (UDL) focuses on minimizing barriers to learning for all learners.7 Learners come to us with diverse motivations, diverse educational preparedness, and diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The UDL guidelines provide educators with a means for meeting the needs of all learners in the same educational situation. The UDL principles are
Let’s take a closer look at how these principles can be used in the design of a tutorial.
Padlet
Bad navigation can render an otherwise great tutorial almost useless. Navigation should be intuitive, and the learner should not have to think about how they will move through a tutorial, answer a question, or exit the tutorial. They should readily know which parts of a tutorial are interactive, which text is hyperlinked, and what will happen when they click a particular element. Learners should always have a way to move back and forth through a tutorial and return to the beginning. Not allowing the learner to move back and forth can lead to decreased motivation. However, some learners may move through content too quickly and skip vital information. If possible, allow more advanced learners to move more freely through a tutorial while restricting the movements of novice learners. A common navigation issue is double navigation, where there are two different ways to move through a tutorial, such as a menu and an arrow, which can confuse learners. Any double navigation should be removed. If your tutorial is visually complex and includes some type of game that needs instructions, learners should be given the option to skip through the instructions. You should also include a Help or a Hint button where users can get extra help if needed. Again, as much as possible we want to avoid boring and frustrating the learner. If your course has several different parts that users must complete, include a road map or path so they can see what they have completed and what lies ahead.
Culturally inclusive teaching “is an approach to teaching that incorporates attributes and characteristics of, as well as knowledge from, students’ cultural background into instructional strategies and course content to improve their academic achievement.”10 As librarians, we teach all students from traditional freshmen to first-generation immigrants to foreign graduate students. Additionally we build our tutorials without ever having met our learners. This makes it much harder to design tutorials that reflect who our students are, but it is possible to create tutorials that are more inclusive. Having created tutorials for students from across the globe, I have come up with the following best practices: