Equal Accessibility
Do you practice an "equal" approach to eLearning development? The goal of Section 508 is to provide persons with disabilities access to information in a comparable manner to the access available to people without disabilities.
Time after time, I see separate but equal opportunities. There’s the “click here for a text transcript” of a video where learning relies on observing body movement or techniques. A video clip of a physician requiring a patient to “do this” or “walk across the room like this” doesn’t get the message over to an individual who is blind.
Consider preparing the video script with more clues. Instead of saying “raise your arms,” be specific: “Raise your arms in front of you, palms up, and parallel to the floor.” Without this clue, a learner could reasonably expect the arms to be raised above the head with palms facing out.
Try this for yourself. Ask a friend or colleague to raise their left arm. In which position is it raised? Did you tell them to do that, or were they guessing? Now ask another person to close their eyes and this time give them explicit instructions – raise your left arm above your head and bend it at the elbow.
Remember, if you’re working with existing video, you must insert these clues. There’s a danger this will throw off your synchronization, in which case you’ll have to edit the video and insert pauses long enough to sufficiently accommodate the clue.
