Three practical literacies a hiring manager assumes you have and a QA reviewer needs: whether a design can be used by everyone it is for, which form of delivery fits the need, and whether a screen is laid out so that it can be read. None of them is deep in this course, and all of them will be expected of you on the first day of a job. Accessibility comes first because it is a legal requirement in most of the settings you will work in, and because a design that some learners cannot use is not a design that works.
By the end you should be able to apply the WCAG 2.1 Level AA basics to a screen: captions and transcripts, alt text, color contrast, keyboard operability, heading structure (10.1); distinguish eLearning, instructor-led, virtual instructor-led, blended, microlearning and performance support, and match a need to a format (10.2); state what SCORM and xAPI are for, well enough to talk to an LMS administrator (10.3); and apply contrast, repetition, alignment and proximity to critique a slide (10.4).
Read alongside this lesson: The Simple Guide to Visual Design in Education You Must Read (8 minutes) for 10.4, and Creating Effective Job Aids (9 minutes) for the performance-support format in 10.2. The accessibility section is the reading for 10.1; there is no article yet.
10.1 Accessibility: WCAG 2.1 AA in practice
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, published by the W3C, are the standard that most laws and procurement rules point to: Section 508 in the United States federal context, the ADA as interpreted by courts and regulators, and the accessibility legislation of most countries you will sell into. Level AA of version 2.1 is the conformance level almost every contract names. (Newer versions exist; verify which one a given client requires, because it changes.) The guidelines are organized under four principles, remembered as POUR: content must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust.
You do not need to know all of WCAG to be useful. You need to catch the failures that account for most of the problems in learning content, and to know when to bring in a specialist. The six below are the ones to run on every screen you review.
- Captions and transcripts. Every video has accurate synchronized captions; every audio-only piece has a transcript. Auto-generated captions are a start and are not accurate enough to ship without review. Captions serve deaf and hard-of-hearing learners and also everyone on a shared workstation with no headphones, which in Lesson 8's handoff brief was all of them.
- Text alternatives. Every image that carries meaning has alt text that conveys the meaning, not the appearance ("bar chart: completions rose from 40 to 85 percent after the redesign," not "chart"). Decorative images are marked so screen readers skip them. Complex diagrams need a longer text equivalent nearby.
- Color contrast. Normal text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 against its background; large text at least 3 to 1. Grey text on a white background, a brand color that is beautiful and pale, and any text over a photograph are the usual failures. A free contrast checker takes ten seconds; use one.
- Not by color alone. Information conveyed by color must also be conveyed another way. Red-versus-green for wrong-versus-right fails for roughly one in twelve men; add a word or an icon. This course's quiz feedback says "Correct" and "Incorrect" in words for this reason.
- Keyboard operability and focus. Everything a mouse can do, a keyboard can do, in a sensible order, with a visible focus indicator. Drag-and-drop interactions in authoring tools are the most frequent offender; so are custom players with unlabeled buttons.
- Heading structure and reading order. Headings are real headings (not bold text) in a logical hierarchy, so a screen-reader user can navigate by them. Reading order matches visual order. A slide built as a picture of text has no structure at all.
Universal Design for Learning, from Lesson 6, is the design philosophy that goes beyond compliance: multiple means of engagement, representation, and action and expression. WCAG says what must be true for a learner with a disability to use the material; UDL says how to design so the widest range of learners can learn from it. Meet the first; aim for the second.
Check yourself: a module has an autoplaying narrated animation with no captions, key terms shown in red for emphasis, and a drag-and-drop sorting activity. Name the failures and the principle each violates.
No captions: perceivable (a deaf learner gets nothing from the narration). Red for emphasis alone: perceivable (colorblind learners and screen-reader users miss the emphasis; add bold or a marker). Drag-and-drop with no keyboard alternative: operable. Autoplay is also a problem for operable (the learner cannot control pace) and for Mayer's segmenting principle from Lesson 4.
10.2 Delivery formats, and matching one to a need
The format is a design decision, not a default, and stakeholders will often have decided it before they call you ("we need an eLearning"). Part of analysis is checking that decision.
| Format | What it is | Fits when | Strains when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Self-paced eLearning | Asynchronous modules in an LMS, built in an authoring tool | Many learners, dispersed, stable content, consistency matters | The skill is interpersonal or judgment-heavy; the content changes monthly |
| Instructor-led training (ILT) | Facilitated, in a room | Discussion, practice with feedback, team-building, sensitive topics | Scale and cost; consistency across facilitators |
| Virtual instructor-led (vILT) | Facilitated, live, online | ILT's benefits without travel; distributed teams | Attention over long sessions; hands-on practice |
| Blended | Self-paced knowledge plus live practice | Most professional skills: learn the model alone, practice it together | The two halves are not designed as one experience |
| Microlearning | Short, focused pieces, often mobile, often spaced | Reinforcement, spaced retrieval (Lesson 4), just-in-time refreshers | It is asked to teach something complex from scratch |
| Performance support and job aids | Checklists, quick references, decision aids used at the moment of need | The task is infrequent, procedural, or too long to memorize | The task requires judgment a checklist cannot carry |
Two principles for choosing. First, ask what the learner must be able to do without support, and what they can look up: everything in the second group is a job aid, not a course, and the linked article on job aids is the guide. Second, match the practice to the performance: a skill performed live with people (a difficult conversation) needs live practice with people; a procedure performed alone at a screen can be practiced alone at a screen.
Check yourself: a company wants all managers to "know the new expense policy." The policy is forty pages, changes annually, and a manager consults it perhaps twice a month. Format?
Performance support: a searchable reference and a one-page decision aid for the common cases, plus a short microlearning piece announcing what changed. A course that asks managers to memorize forty pages they will look up anyway is the wrong format, and Mager and Pipe (Lesson 8) would have asked whether it was a training problem at all.
10.3 SCORM and xAPI, enough to talk to the LMS administrator
A learning management system needs a way to launch a course and record what happened. Two standards do that, and you need to know them well enough to answer "what format do you need this in."
SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model, from the Advanced Distributed Learning initiative) is the older standard and still the most common. A SCORM package is a zip file the LMS can launch; it reports completion, a score, pass or fail, and time, and not much else. Every mainstream authoring tool exports it. When an administrator says "send me the SCORM," this is what they mean, and you should ask which version their LMS accepts.
xAPI (the Experience API) records learning experiences as statements ("Maria completed the handoff simulation with a score of 92") to a learning record store, and it can record activity anywhere, not only inside an LMS launch: a simulation, a video, a job aid opened on a phone. It is what you need when you want to know what learners did rather than only whether they finished. Fewer organizations have the record store to use it, so ask.
Two other terms you will hear. LTI connects external tools to an LMS in higher education. cmi5 is a newer profile that uses xAPI inside an LMS launch and is slowly replacing SCORM. Know the names; the administrator will tell you which they support.
10.4 Four visual principles for critique
Robin Williams's The Non-Designer's Design Book gave the field four principles that non-designers can apply and that cover most of what is wrong with most slides: contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity. The linked article covers them in an education context; the version you need for QA is short.
- Contrast. If two elements are not the same, make them clearly different: in size, weight, color. Weak contrast (a heading barely larger than the body) makes the structure invisible. This is also where color contrast for accessibility lives.
- Repetition. Repeat visual elements consistently: the same heading style, the same color for the same kind of thing, the same position for the same control. Repetition is what makes a course feel like one course.
- Alignment. Nothing is placed arbitrarily; every element lines up with something. Centered-everything is the most common failure; a strong left edge is the most common fix.
- Proximity. Related items are grouped; unrelated items are separated. Proximity is Mayer's spatial contiguity (Lesson 4) seen from the design side: the label belongs next to the thing it labels.
In QA you are not being asked whether a screen is beautiful. You are being asked whether its layout helps or hinders learning, and these four give you the words: "the heading and body have too little contrast, the three related callouts are scattered across the slide, and the caption is a full width away from the diagram it explains."
Before the checkpoint
Six questions. The six accessibility checks and the principle each belongs to, the formats and their fit, what SCORM and xAPI each record, and the four visual principles.
Sources named in this lesson: W3C (WCAG 2.1); the Advanced Distributed Learning initiative (SCORM, xAPI, cmi5); CAST (UDL, from Lesson 6); Robin Williams (The Non-Designer's Design Book); the linked 24/7 Teach articles. The WCAG version a client requires changes over time; verify it for every contract.