How do you design and deliver inclusive and accessible training and development programs?

One thing I have found helpful is to understand the business and people challenges of the audience, this helps to design the content exercises that are relevant and can be applied in real work scenarios.

If possible for smaller groups, teams and offices one on one meetings can be very insightful to gain knowledge of your audience needs.

Avoid learning styles when designing content. It’s overly simplistic and doesn’t take into account the accessibility needs of people, nor the topic or situation which will also have a big impact on the range of formats required.

Creating product from our mind is waste of time. Asking and taking that time to understand the needs and want helps us to tailor our message and content that is actionable. The goal of any content should be goal is long-term follower ship and results. These both is not possible if it is not relevant to the audience.

Consider the needs of employees who may speak English as a second language, those with Neurodivergent conditions, and various learning preferences (e.g. verbal, visual, kinesthetic). Today's technology has many great inclusive features like live transcrption, auto-play closed captioning, user-controlled playback speeds, translation plug-ins, visual size adjustment, dark modes, and many many more. Yet these aren't often the defaults, so speak with your vendor's and connect with their customer success teams to learn best practices and how to fully leverage the features you're likely already paying for that could make learning more accessible and inclusive. By the way this benefits ALL learners!

Tools such as *Loom video allow you to create custom training for an individual or a team. *Tango can save you time developing written instructions with screenshots when providing instructions for apps and programs.

In just the last 12 months, we've seen the challenges when building digital content for WCAG, ADA, EAA standards. When using technology and tools for building digital learning content, remember to focus on the architecture of the build before you start the project. Seems like a no-brainer, but you'll be surprised how often you will have to iterate to achieve accessibility (thereby increasing costs and time). We've seen organizations take the easy way out in accessibility by opting for the simplest learning content designs. Namely, quizzes. But if your focus is on the learner, then make sure you achieve accessibility even in your better training programs.