An equitable and inclusive education system is the foundation of a thriving society. Providing equal learning opportunities to all, including students with disabilities is crucial to ensure an inclusive learning environment.
Even the Every Child Succeeds Act makes it mandatory for schools in the U.S. to provide equal learning opportunities for students with disabilities.
Venngage CEO Eugene Woo discussed this topic in depth in A11Y Insights Podcast with Dr. Nicole L’Etoile, an expert in educational accessibility. In this article, I will share the key insights of the podcast into how educators and institutions can integrate accessibility into their content from the ground up.
You’ll also get to learn how Accessible tools like Venngage’s Accessible PDF checker can empower educational institutions in their journey to making education more inclusive.
Click to jump ahead:
- The importance of proactive accessibility
- Utilizing accessibility tools
- Training and awareness for educators
- Structured design process
- The role of AI in accessibility
- Future trends in accessibility
- Design accessible educational material with Venngage
The importance of proactive accessibility
Dr. L’Etoile explains that the major problem in designing accessible courses is treating accessibility as a last-minute thought.
I could be working with an instructional designer who has built a course or documents PDFs of created something that um they were so proud of that they worked so hard on then get to the finish line and be told that oh well there’s another way of doing it we have to add this and we have to add that.
Dr. Nicole L’Etoile, Owner of L’Etoile Education
This can make course designers feel frustrated because they have to make a lot of changes.
Therefore, it’s important to focus on accessibility while designing curriculums or learning material and not consider accessibility as an afterthought. This is called following a proactive approach.
Accessibility shouldn’t be the final brushstroke – it should be woven into the canvas from the start!
All in on how do we actually build accessibility as something that you would do reactively at the end of the process but how can we be more proactive? How can we help creators be more proactive? We kind of try to embrace the accessible design sort of philosophy like hey just design it from the start design accessibility from the start as opposed to just fix it at the end.
Dr. Nicole L’Etoile, Owner of L’Etoile Education
This proactive approach means thinking about diverse learning needs, such as those with physical, cognitive, or sensory disabilities, at the very start of the design process.
What are the benefits of embedding accessibility principles into the design process from the beginning?
- All students get equal access to educational material, fostering a universal learning experience.
- Saves time and resources as you don’t have to spend too much time redesigning inaccessible material.
- Improves learning outcomes as you cater to the learning needs of all students.
It’s way better to try and fix the problem at the source than to create course materials and documents accessible from the start as opposed to trying to fix it at the end after they’ve invested so much time in it and now they have to go in and redo everything.
Dr. Nicole L’Etoile, Owner of L’Etoile Education
A proactive approach to accessibility integration in education mainly involves three components:
- Use of Accessibility tools
- Early training and awareness
- Structured design processes
Let’s understand all the three components in detail below.
Utilizing accessibility tools
An excellent way to make accessibility a core element of education is to leverage tools and solutions, such as Venngage, WAVE, Arc Toolkit and Andy. These tools help with content structure and navigation by arranging the content into proper headings, generating alt text for images, reviewing visual design and providing a color contrast checker.
You can also use accessibility tools for conducting accessibility audits. They highlight issues such as improper heading structures, insufficient color contrast, and missing alternative text for images. Moreover, they provide detailed reports, prioritizing issues based on their severity and compliance with accessibility standards like WCAG.
Accessibility tools can help you:
- Identify accessibility issues: It can be difficult for educators to manually check every document and ensure accessibility guidelines are followed. Accessibility tools help scan entire documents quickly identify improper heading structures, inadequate color contrast, missing alt text for images and other common accessibility issues. This improves content efficiency and accuracy and ensures all students get equal access to the course material.
- Prioritization of fixes: Accessibility tools provide detailed reports on accessibility issues. You can go through the report and categorize the issues by their severity, such as critical, moderate, or recommended fixes. This way, you can easily prioritize issues that need immediate attention, making the remediation process more manageable.
- Compliance with standards: Adherence to legal compliance is another excellent benefit of accessibility tools. They help you ensure that the content meets recognized accessibility standards such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
- Educational Value: Accessibility tools also serve as excellent educational resources for course content creators. By viewing accessibility reports, they can understand the areas that need improvement. This helps educators gain practical learning experience in understanding and applying accessibility principles.
For example, you can use Venngage’s Accessibility Checker to identify the issues in your design or document. All you have to do is click ‘File’ in the top toolbar. Then Select ‘Accessibility’ from the menu to open the Accessibility Checker in the right panel.
Now, let’s see the different accessibility tools and their key features.
- The Wave: It offers a comprehensive analysis of web content, highlighting accessibility issues and providing recommendations for fixes.
- Arc Toolkit: Arc provides robust features for testing and validating web content, ensuring it meets accessibility guidelines.
- Andy: This is a user-friendly tool that integrates into browser developer tools, Andy helps identify and correct accessibility issues in real-time.
- Venngage: An infographic solution that offers accessible templates for creating educational material. Our accessibility checker detects accessibility issues in your design and helps you resolve them
Training and awareness for educators
Another important pillar of building a proactive approach toward creating accessible courses is training the designers, educators and administrators. Dr. L’Etoile suggests that institutions should invest in comprehensive training programs to educate staff about accessibility standards and best practices. These programs should cover the use of accessibility tools, the importance of proper document structure, and the legal requirements for educational content.
Dr. L’Etoile follows an interesting approach for training course instructors on accessibility.
You bring a course to me and it’s not accessible for whatever reason. Your headings are all over the place and the color contrast is a mess. I’m going to go in and fix it and record how I fixed it or what I’m going to do to change. I will show you the tool I’m going to use and then I’m going to gradually release it to you.
Dr. Nicole L’Etoile, Owner of L’Etoile Education
This way, course designers get to know their misses and rectify them.
Here’s how institutions can simplify the process for educators:
- Creating Accessible Templates: By creating and using templates that adhere to accessibility standards, institutions can simplify the process for educators and designers, ensuring that all new content automatically meets basic accessibility requirements.
Templates are like the guard rails that if someone just uses the template they’re 80% compliant
Dr. Nicole L’Etoile, Owner of L’Etoile Education
- Provide ongoing support and resources: Providing ongoing support and resources, such as access to accessibility experts and continuous updates on new accessibility standards, helps maintain a proactive approach to accessibility in educational settings.
It’s not just about training it’s also about providing the infrastructure in guard rails so that it’s a lot easier for people to create something accessible right out of the box as opposed to having to learn like you know a whole different tool.
Eugene, CEO at Venngage
Structured design process
Imagine you are viewing a presentation on business ethics. It starts off well by explaining the meaning of business ethics in detail. However, the second slide jumps to case studies of business ethics. You can see a missing flow. Plus, many slides are overloaded with text and there’s no proper conclusion.
The presentation would likely confuse you and fail to achieve clear learning objectives.
This is why you need a structured design process, especially for designing accessible course material. It means having clear learning objectives and doing accessibility checks at each stage, such as ensuring color contrast, adding alt text, and making documents and multimedia content accessible.
Following a structured design process for creating accessible courses can involve:
- Defining course objectives.
- Understanding the needs of different learners, their learning styles, and the assistive technologies they use.
- Creating a structure for the content to ensure logical flow and easy readability.
- Adding visual content such as images, charts and videos.
- Testing for accessibility compliance by using accessibility checkers
The role of AI in accessibility
Reviewing educational material for accessibility can be a challenging task. You have to check each element of the course content, inclusion images, text, and icons. Additionally, you should know how to use different assistive technologies to ensure they are compatible with different formats of the course material.
This is where AI technologies step in as a savior to enhance accessibility. They automate the review process, such as checking and generating alt text for images and highlighting accessibility issues.
AI can also provide real-time feedback to content creators, helping them to make quick adjustments to the course material. Let’s see in detail how the use of AI enables an inclusive learning environment.
- Automated accessibility checks: AI solutions like Venngage can check accessibility issues in documents, such as incorrect text structure and color contrast, and missing image descriptions. This helps you make corrections more efficiently.
- Generating alt text and descriptions: AI can help generate alt text for images, providing descriptions for visually impaired users. This saves time and effort, especially for complex learning materials so you can focus better on the quality of the course content.
- Content remediation: AI tools can also assist in the remediation of content by automatically adjusting formatting issues such as heading structures and reading order in documents. It ensures that screen readers can navigate content correctly, making it accessible to users with visual impairments.
- Predictive analytics and personalization: Another interesting use case of AI is that it can analyze how different users interact with educational content and suggest modifications to improve accessibility based on individual needs. For example, it could recommend larger text sizes, different color schemes, or alternative formats that are more accessible for specific learners.
Even though AI serves as a powerful assistant in generating accessible educational content, like other things, we cannot rely completely on AI. It’s important for educational institutions to take AI suggestions with a pinch of salt and maintain human oversight to ensure adherence to accessibility standards and guidelines.
Future trends in accessibility
As more organizations have started to focus on accessibility, the trends are gradually changing. There is growing interest in integrating AI and machine learning into accessibility tools to enhance their capabilities and reduce manual effort in creating accessible content. AI and ML integrated accessibility tools can understand the needs of different learners and personalize the learning experiences.
Dr. L’Etoile also highlights the upcoming WCAG 3.0 standards, which aim to simplify the guidelines and make them more user-friendly. The most significant part about the WCAG 3.0 standards is that it will have functional categories that groups guidelines based on the type of disability, such as visual, auditory, physical, speech and more.
Design accessible educational courses with Venngage
Creating an inclusive learning environment is not just about using the latest technologies. Educational institutions need to take a proactive approach to ensure accessibility in education. This involves making accessibility the focal point while designing the curriculum and the course material as opposed to fixing the course content to make it accessible.
Educational institutions can greatly benefit from accessibility tools such as The Wave, Arc Toolkit, and Venngage to adhere to accessibility guidelines and create interactive and inclusive educational content.
Venngage offers a comprehensive solution for accessibility.
