Accessibility & Inclusivity Notes - I

Reading time ~ 1 minute | Speaking time ~ 2 minutes

I am personally learning about how to make eLearning or any content for that matter accessible and inclusive in nature. Because when we design with accessibility in mind, we improve the learning experience for everyone. I am not an expert in this field however, I endeavour to learn about accessibility and share it with you. I promise to keep these notes accessible, practical, simple and short (1-2 minutes). These notes will also focus on how we can start by making eLearning accessible from the start of the eLearning development process rather than considering it at the end.

Let's start!

The first thing that we need to address while designing accessible content is the?reading order. The order in which the content is read to understand its meaning. The visual learner can read the page and choose/determine the reading sequence. However, for people using assistive technology, such as screen readers that read content aloud, the reading is done in a linear order (unless specified) starting from the top left corner and ending at the bottom right corner (for English content). Not all the content may follow the linear order, so it's imperative to tell the assistive technology how to go about it.

According to the WCAG standard (international standard for making web content accessible)?1.3.2 Meaningful Sequence - Level A, we need to make sure that the content presented on the screen should be readable by the screen readers in a meaningful order which makes sense.

That's it.

In the second note, I will share a few practical tips on setting the reading order in Articulate Storyline.

Have you ever tried reading web content using a screen reader? How was your experience? Let me know in the comments.

Feel free to share this note further.