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Appearing in the December 2004 edition of HRMonthly, was the following article written by Mickey, our Managing Director. (Look for it on page 36-37, in the Training section)
Making it user-friendly
Impaired vision, hearing problems, restricted mouse skills… disabilities big and small can put e-learning out of reach.
BY MICKEY CLARK
Unplug your computer mouse. Put earplugs in. Close your eyes. Now start your favourite e-learning course.
Can’t find it? Not too easy to operate? Doesn’t make much sense?
Most customised e-learning courses are not designed to be used by people with disabilities, which will include some of your employees, suppliers, business partners and customers. The courses don’t work well if you are visually impaired, and may be confusing if you have a hearing, cognitive or mobility impairment.
The importance of using instructional design to make e-learning accessible to everyone is reflected in the statistics. About 18 per cent of Australians—3.6 million people—have some kind of disability, says the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Another 3.1 million have an impairment or long-term condition that may at times restrict their everyday activities.
The Royal Blind Society estimates that 300,000 Australians have “some difficulty” with print, even with glasses. Up to seven per cent of learning audiences are likely to be colour-blind—those subtle variations of tone in your important supporting graph may be invisible to them.
E-learning for the disabled is also highlighted by the ageing population—in effect, we might consider ourselves a “temporarily enabled” population—and there are the moral and legal aspects to consider. The Disability Discrimination Act 1992 obliges Commonwealth departments to ensure that online information and services are accessible to people with disabilities. Corporations may be liable for discrimination damages.
Good corporate citizens are starting to give the matter some attention, and they may be rewarded by being perceived as forward-thinking in considering e-learning as an extension of equal opportunity policies.
In business terms, just as automatic door openers, access ramps and vibrating mobile phones have benefited the wider population, designing e-learning for accessibility can be of benefit through increased usability, and in some cases, better learning retention. For example, many of the design rules that assist a person with a disability also benefit older learners.
The interactivity and engagement in e-learning makes access more complicated than for websites. Quality e-learning courses have programming rules that depend on the actions a learner takes. The rules are mixed in with the learning content—which wreaks havoc with screen readers for the blind (software that reads onscreen content out loud).
Courses typically rely on subtle navigation paths, detailed supporting graphics, animations, progress markers and video clips. These all need to be designed more carefully to ensure clarity regardless of method of access. Subtitling of videos, better colour contrast and descriptive tags for graphics, and clearer navigation paths may be needed.
Interactions requiring complicated mouse operation, such as drag and drop, object-matching and ranking elements, need to be designed to offer an “equivalent experience”. Keyboard alternatives are a good start where mouse use is impaired.
Many web-delivered e-learning courses use technology that doesn’t meet accessibility standards. They assume specific settings in the learner’s web browser to operate properly, settings which learners with different disabilities may change to enhance their use of other web content. Although some courseware vendors have taken steps to improve accessibility, custom e-learning developers have been slower to respond.
The time has come to join the good corporate citizens of Australia by eliminating the disabilities in your e-learning.
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