You’ve got a good way along the road of commissioning some e-learning and then one of the project stakeholders pipes up with the question: “What about accessibility?”. Rather than being a question that demolishes all of your hard work to date, the requirements for accessibility in the Disability Discrimination Act (1995) are not as onerous as you might think.
As Nick Rushby points out in October’s e-learning age, provided that disabled employees are offered an equivalent alternative to meeting the learning need that an e-learning module meets, there is no breach of the law. This means that you can provide e-learning that is rich in interaction and is Flash-based, if that’s what your target audience is going to respond to best, just as long as you’ve thought through how to cater for the people who can’t access it.
Hence accessibility is no longer an excuse for serving up everybody with the kind of bland page-turning e-learning that switched so many people off in 2000.
If you are providing an accessible version of e-learning, this can be cheaper than you’d think. For instance, amongst others, our authoring environment ‘Originate’ allows easy publishing of an accessible version as it’s based on Word templates. Hence you can meet the needs of the DDA without compromising on the quality of your main e-learning offering.
