Accessibility Testing for Learning and Development

Alright, I do want to get started with the small group that we have. I have my eyes on my, my LinkedIn for, for stragglers and for last-minute registrations. Like I mentioned, I did have a lot of people want to tune in later for the recording and transcript. So hello to everyone tuning in later today. I wanted to do a quick session on accessibility testing for learning and development. And the reason I wanted to put this together is because the month of October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month, and that's a mouthful. Uh, we call that NDEAM around here, and, uh, Sorry, checking admissions here. So I wanted to just take a couple minutes at the end of our National Disability Employment Awareness Month and share a few resources specifically for people doing learning and development that want to do more accessibility testing in, in the products that they're doing. I know there are so many resources. There were great sessions at DevLearn. There are sessions coming up from ATD on creating accessible learning materials. There is a lot of information out there. So today this is really just a quick focus on some tools you can use for testing. So I do have a Mentimeter if you would like to follow along with the presentation. There are a couple interactive elements, but there are a small group of us today tuned in live and more for the recording. So all of these slides will be sent um, after the fact, along with the recording and the transcript. Um, so if you'd like to jump in, you can do that. If you've never used Mentimeter, um, there are a couple options available to you. You can ask a question at any time. So, um, using the little Q&A feature, any questions you have about accessibility, even if you think it's off topic, uh, we'll do some Q&A time at the end and make sure that, uh, any questions that come up get answered. And then there's a little heart reaction button. If you especially like what's going on in the slide, feel free to react and interact with the, the presentation in that way. So other than that, you've got a QR code or a website to jump into the presentation. Again, no pressure there. We will send all of the slides afterwards. All right. So I do wanna pause for a moment before I jump into the rest of the presentation. If you are in Zoom and using using any of the Zoom controls. Closed captioning is available to you in Zoom as well. So if that is a feature that you would like to use during this presentation, closed caption is available to you in the Zoom settings. And like I said, transcript sent after the fact. All right. So who, who am I and what am I doing here? My name is Britne Jenke. And I've done a lot of accessibility work in my life and recently completed a certification, and I'm working on yet another certification for doing accessibility. So the first one, I am a Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies, and that is through the International Association of Accessibility Professionals, a professional organization for those of us that do accessibility work. And I am also working through the government's Trusted Tester program. So if you are familiar with the terms Section 508, that is a specific set of requirements that the government puts out for materials that federal employees or consumers of federal services would interact with. So being a tester for federal projects is a service that my my side business, my consulting company offers. So if you are interested in actually having someone do accessibility testing for you, I would love to be your girl. But otherwise, I love to share my resources with other people. I want everyone to be practicing accessibility in their work. So I put together just this quick session for us to talk about some resources to get some accessibility done in our own organizations. Alright, so if you are playing along with the Mentimeter, I would just like to know, get a pulse check from the audience. What is your current level of experience with doing anything with accessibility? Is this maybe the first webinar that you have ever attended on the topic? You've heard of it, you practice it, or you're already an expert. I'm going to tell you that I'm, I'm Probably somewhere between practice and expert. I know I have a lot to learn still, and a lot left I can practice, but I do practice it regularly and want to share the resources that I have. So thank you for the pulse check. This really kind of helps me tailor what I'm talking about. So all of you have at least heard of accessibility and might— why we might want to be doing this, especially in learning and development. And I love that some of you are already practicing this regularly. And I love even more all of you that signed up for the the live webinar or the recording to be able to learn more about tools to incorporate this more into your practice. So thanks for, for the pulse check here. All right, so let's dive right in. What, what are we talking about when we say accessibility testing? So this is actually doing tests on our digital content to make sure that people with disabilities can use our content. So this digital content means things like websites or in our world, e-learning modules and PDFs and videos and things like that. Anything that is consumed digitally can have accessibility issues for people with disabilities. And when we talk about applying actual testing to our, our output, our content that we have created, we, we talk about that in a few different ways. So we might be doing actual manual testing. So people with disabilities testing the, the materials you've created. We might be doing some automated testing, which is what I'm going to talk about today, using some automated tools to do those tests for us and to call out accessibility issues. And then the other way you might do accessibility testing is hand that off to a consultant. So again, I mentioned that if that's something you're interested in doing, looking for someone to do a full accessibility consultation, there are many consultants that you could hire to do that service for you as well. So we're going to focus on those automated tools that those of us in the everyday practice can use when we're talking about accessibility testing today. So pause for a second, and maybe if we don't know why we should be testing our materials for accessibility, I want to just pause and consider not only the, the ways that people with disabilities may access your content, and I'm talking about assistive technologies like screen readers or a screen magnifier, something like speech recognition software. Accessibility also gives other people access to content that may have what you would not consider your traditional disability settings or services. So an example that I use a lot from my own experience is I was creating training materials, videos that needed to be watched by employees that worked in a factory. And normally they would schedule time away from their factory machines to complete their training. But what we found out was people liked to sneak in some training in their downtime, which was great and proactive of them, and we loved the initiative. But they were are having trouble hearing their training videos while on the noisy factory floor trying to complete that training video on their cell phone or their other personal device. So applying some accessibility principles like we would for someone who is hard of hearing in general helps employees that may be in a compromised hearing situation. They were unable to hear the video on the factory floor, so adding captions and a transcript to those videos made the content more accessible to everyone. We not only met the needs of our employees, current and future, with disabilities, we met the needs of employees in any number of situations they might find themselves in, and they were able to access the content. So simple things like video captions, transcripts are easy accessibility fixes. We'll talk about a couple of those, but first I want to hear from you if you're playing with the Mentimeter still, what accessibility issues have you encountered in the materials either you've created or you've tried to access as a learner? So I threw out some options there for you. You may have encountered a video in your lifetime that did not have closed captioning on it or did not have transcripts, and that was a potential accessibility issue. Another one that I encounter quite often Great responses coming in here. Captions, text too small. Absolutely. Something that isn't often considered when we're creating, especially e-learning modules, is the types of navigation that our users might have. So some users navigate without using a mouse, may use keyboard input only, or some may use alternative input devices altogether. Britne Jenke. So there are a wide variety of assistive devices for people that have mobility issues, and certain interactions we tend to build in our e-learning may not be accessible to someone who is using only a keyboard or does not have use of a touchscreen or their hand. I'm thinking interactions like a drag-and-drop or a hotspot. These are great interactions and great to learn from. But just consider the potential accessibility challenges that these could pose for your users. All right. Yeah, I'm seeing the, the words pop in here. I love it. The light text on terrible backgrounds. I tried to mix some colors for this presentation so everything was viewable. But what I want to cover real quickly before we get into the testing tools is the most common things that I see when I do accessibility testing for others. So these are maybe your quick fixes. If you want to tackle these top 5 things, you're going to address most accessibility issues before they even get to a tester in the first place. So one we didn't mention yet is alt text. This is alternative text, and this is anything on an image or a video that lets a screen reader know what that image or video— what was happening there. So great alt text. I have worked very hard in my career to craft great alt text. There are many resources for this, but the best thing you can do is just accurately describe the picture if you have a visual element in any of your learning materials. That way a screen reader can pick up the information being conveyed in that image as well as any text that you're sharing. We mentioned captions and transcripts on videos. So the difference between that— captions are like we have on the Zoom recording now, live captioning or closed captioning of the text and sounds that are happening. A transcript would be something provided, downloaded after the fact. So I will provide a full transcript of this recording after the fact, but that would be a full text download of whatever your video or audio resource was. We talked about text size that got brought up. Another thing that I don't see often enough is using the, the elements within your creation tool, whether that is um, if you're using something like Articulate Storyline or even Microsoft Word or PowerPoint, using the, uh, settings to create heading text versus body text. And the reason for this is screen readers will pick that up differently and mark headings as different sections in your text. So if you have, uh, different sections in your document, use the formatting tools available to you in your creation software to note where not only appropriate text sizes for the content that you have, but that heading and body text is notated accordingly. We did touch on color contrast in the, the collection we had before. So this is being sure that text is readable. Very common issues are seeing light backgrounds with light text on them. A good way to really pop your contrast is to always try just doing black on white, white on black. I've done a few minor color splashes in this presentation, but tried to keep it real crisp, clear, and good color contrast. And one of the tools I'm gonna show you in a moment is a way to check your color contrast no matter what you're doing. And the last thing that's an easy fix is the interactive elements. And I mentioned this when I was talking about drag and drops or other hotspots and things we do with interactive learning. Just being assured that there are alternate ways for learners to access that information. If you have an activity that is a drag and drop, perhaps create an alternate version that can be filled out with text on a keyboard. So a learner is completing the same activity without the mobility challenge. All right. So once we fix those really common issues, how do we kind of test for the rest of it? So that is actually where I'm going to spend the rest of the time for this little presentation. Is talking about some of my favorite accessibility resources that I use for testing. And I've got 3 of them here. 2 of them come from an organization, WebAIM, and another one is an app by an independent creator. And I'm going to kind of give you some features of each of these apps, why you might want to use them in your testing practices, and then we'll talk about some accessibility tools that are built into software. But first I want to show you— let me actually— going to switch the screen share and show you what WAVE looks like. So WAVE is a tool from WebAIM. Let me bring this browser window over here. So this is WAVE's website. You can drop any web page right in here and it will run an accessibility What I'd like to point out is the browser extension. So if you are publishing e-learning, you can usually do so in an HTML format, even if not fully to your LMS or to SCORM. You can usually publish your resource locally as HTML and then run this browser checker. It's a quick little button that appears in your browser and gives you a full accessibility testing summary. So on WAVE's own web page, they have no errors in contrast or accessibility. One minor alert that I can see here in the details, but it will call out things like links and headers and notate all of the accessibility things I might want to be considering when structuring content that outputs in a web-browsable format. So that's most of our e-learning modules. I would definitely run your, uh, WAVE checker on your Storyline output, things like that. But you can also do it on PDFs. So any PDF that you can open in a web browser, you can also run the WAVE accessibility checker. Now it's not going to tell you, um, exactly how to fix everything, but there are reference details to, um, accessibility resources on the web that you can use to investigate your issues further. But this is a good place to start. Calling out some of the things you could have missed when creating your, your e-learning or your PDF in the first place. The next one I want to talk about is the WebAIM Color Contrast Checker. So again, this is another link. If you're following on the Mentimeter, you should still have that link available in your presentation, and I will send it again after the fact just to be sure. But this is a book marklet. It is a link you drag up to your bookmarks bar in your browser, and it opens up a color contrast checker. Now you can use this again on anything that outputs in a web page. So if this is your Storyline output or your PDF or any other resource that can be output into a, a browser, can use this color contrast bookmarklet. Now what you do It's a little tricky. It doesn't automatically start picking the text colors for you. You do have to use the color text picker. So using the little eyedropper, I can select my white background, and I can come over here and select some darker text and see that my color contrast ratio is appropriate. It passes all text elements using that dark blue and that white. So again, any resource you can— if you know your hex colors, if you're working perhaps in a Word document, PDF document, something else, you can type the hex colors directly into the color contrast checker to run that accessibility test for you. But this is a really quick way to just pop up a little window on whatever resource you're currently browsing. And then the final resource that I wanted to show you is actually an app for your cell phone. So I have bookmarked on here— I will send the links after the fact— for on Google Play and on the Apple App Store. It is called Chromatic Vision Simulator. Made by this gentleman, Asada, here. He is the designer on both of those. So same app, same developer, just App Store, different places. This brings up a neat— almost filters for your phone that lets you see what people with varying degrees of colorblindness might see. So for all of the resources I have that are browser-based and text-based, it's nice to have something in your hand that you can hold up to a screen or hold up to another artifact that you may have printed out for your training class and see what it looks like to someone with varying degrees of color vision blindness simulations. So just another neat tool that I found— I find myself using quite a bit just to do a real-life kind of vision check on, on what I'm working on. So another neat tool that I am glad to share with you. And finally, I'm going to share one more link. It's going to be at the very end, but this is my Linktree. I have gathered together a bunch more accessibility resources for everyone. So that was the testing resources. I do have other resources, some books, some courses I've taken, some websites with guidelines and other, other things you can read if you're more interested in accessibility. So again, more links to share at the end. I'm going to switch back to the Mentimeter because we are, we are wrapping up our conversation, and I want to make sure that we have some time for Q&A on anything accessibility. So I hope that you found, first of all, those resources valuable, but if you have any burning questions now is the time to throw that question out there. I will do my best to answer or at least direct you to a resource that might have the answer because like I said, I'm not quite an expert yet, but I do try my best to practice and I'm happy to share my resources with you. So while you're still— you can type in the Mentimeter. I'm going to switch the slide real fast and give you the link. That's the QR code. For the Linktree with the additional resources. So again, I will send out the full slides, the full transcript and recording for this presentation, but I wanted you to have all of these additional resources available to you as well as you continue your own accessibility journeys. So another QR code that should pop you out of the Mentimeter and to a Linktree. If you want to talk to me more about accessibility, you can book time with me on my calendar there. Go to my website. But most of it is just resources for you to learn more about accessibility. So I will pop back and see if we have any burning questions. I don't think that we do. Oh, how can you convince others who don't see the need for accessibility? That is a really great question. I am the type of person that would usually bombard someone with statistics And mention that in the United States, about the recent CDC, uh, recent reports have put out about 27% of adults in the United States have some kind of disability. So they are already your largest diversity group within your organization. Your largest minority group is likely already disabled people, whether they are self-identifying their disability at work or not. So a lot of these resources, the practices that we do for accessibility, first, it's going to help the majority of our, our audience in multiple ways. So not thinking, wow, we've got 27% potential of our population are disabled. Think about things that might help all of us. So you never know when you yourself may become part of that 27% disabled people. You want to— your organization may want to attract more people with disabilities or provide more resources for the employees that they already have. So making small changes to the way that we already work, especially in the world of learning and development, doing instructional design, considering things like universal design for learning and accommodating all ranges of the employee experience when we design a learning activity can really make some ripple waves in how people see if they see that it's easy to practice in an organization, it doesn't become this, this hard sell. So I kind of answered your question from a few different angles there. Hit them with statistics, start doing it anyway, and convince others along the way. That's what I've had to do in organizations and realize that this is something we all might need someday. We all could use this. In different situations we find ourselves in, but we could all find ourselves disabled, and we are future-proofing our organization for ourselves. I hope that answered your question. If you have a follow-up to that, I am also willing to answer. Yes, it did. Thank you, Britne Jenke. All right. Thank you all. Thank you. That for those that made the time to join live again, thank you anyone who tuned in for the recording. All of the slides and transcript and everything are coming shortly, but hopefully you walked away from this short little half hour today with some new ideas for doing accessibility in your own organization. So thank you for joining me. Thank you.