Breaking Barriers: Tips for Developing Accessible Online Education for All Learners
Some tips and resources for developing accessible online educational content for blind and visually impaired students/participants.
Image credit: https://unsplash.com/photos/ewGMqs2tmJI
I recently delivered an online short course on Trusted Autonomous Systems with my good friend Caitlin Bentley. For the first time, we had a visually impaired participant join us for this course. There were a few adjustments we made to the course to make it accessible for this participant and I wanted to share that work here for anyone else who is developing online content.
Before getting into the details, I’ll note here that the adjustments we made did require some extra work and effort; however, the outcome of producing accessible educational content far outweighed the additional time it took to develop that content. Moving forward, I will be implementing the changes detailed in this post as a standard practice for any online courses I develop and deliver, to ensure they are all accessible, regardless of who may or may not be participating.
Alternate text
A slide deck is a useful tool in delivering educational content, or any content for that matter, because it provides a visual marker for verbally delivered content that can help with engagement. Adobe PDF, and some other tools, have screen reader functions, which is an assistive tool for the visually impaired.
For our course, we added ‘alternate text’ to all images in our slide deck. Alternate text is a descriptive text that details the content, context and/or meaning of a visual item in a digital setting. When adding alternate text, be mindful of the information you are conveying. The purpose of alternate text is to convey the message of an image without being able to see the image. As an example, below is an image of the SAE levels of driving automation which we used in our slide deck in the trusted autonomous systems short course. We used this image to demonstrate an example of a taxonomy for levels of autonomy.
The alternate text we added to this image:
This image details the SAE levels of driving automation which go from level 1 on the far left, to level 5 on the far right. For levels 1 to 3, the human is driving whenever driver support features are engaged, even if the human's feet are off the pedals and they are not steering. The human must constantly supervise the driving support features, which includes steering, braking or accelerating as needed to maintain safety. Driver support features may include providing warnings and momentary assistance, steering, braking and/or acceleration support to the driver. For Levels 3 to 5, the human is not driving when the automated driving features are engaged, even if they are seated in the "driver's seat". These automated driving features will not require humans to take over driving. These driving features can drive the vehicle under limited conditions and will not operate unless all required conditions are met.
When writing this text we tried to consider what information was most valuable from the image. We wanted to convey the different ends of the spectrum of this taxonomy so we focussed on high level descriptions as opposed to re-writing every piece of text from the image. The point is to convey useful information, rather than providing a verbatim word dump - granted the above example is quite wordy; however, that particular image does contain a lot of relevant information and context. One additional note here for alternate text, if you have captions for your images, do not just re-use the caption text. A screen reading tool will then spit out both the alternate text and the caption, duplicating information that might not be helpful in understanding the content and context of an image.
We provided a PDF copy of the slide deck to our participant before the course, allowing them time to work through the material before the course.
Verbal Narrative
When we delivered the course, we were also mindful of how we referred to images on a slide deck. Because we had provided the slide deck beforehand, we knew that our participant had worked through that information, so ideally, they would be somewhat familiar with the content. When delivering the course, if there was a slide with an informative image on it (like the SAE levels of driving automation image example provided above) we tried to make sure we referred to the image and also provided a short summary of the image (similar to what we had in the alternate text) to ensure our verbal narrative wasn’t missing this content in the moment.
We were also mindful of how we constructed our narrative. We tried to be as descriptive as possible, providing examples to illustrate descriptions or to emphasise different points. Because our slides are a mechanism for illustrating a narrative or providing visual cues of certain points, we had to consider how our narrative sounded in absence of those slides. A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself, is what I’m saying easy to follow and understand without my slides?
Available Resources and Guidelines
There are a number of existing guidelines and resources around accessibility. I used some of these resources myself. I have curated a short list of useful resources on accessible content that may be helpful:
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community that develops Web standards. They have developed Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and also provide more general standards for accessible online content.
The Australian Government also has resources on accessible and inclusive content.
Microsoft have a helpful blog post on alternate text.
The Australian Department of Education have a set of guidelines for supporting blind and visually impaired students for online education.
