Accessibility

Accessibility is something I’ve been thinking about a lot at work recently because I’m creating e-learning modules that will include some narration and audio clips. I was happy to see that Adobe Captivate now comes with a Closed Captioning feature. However, this isn’t going to help people who have low vision or blindness to navigate the reading sections. In order to keep our file size down, I’ve chosen to use voice-over usually at the beginning and end of the modules, not throughout. Reading the accessibility guidelines has got me thinking about whether or not we should include narration throughout. The challenge with this is time. Creating quality voice-over is time consuming. Matching it to the appropriate content is time consuming. And syncing it with the Closed Captioning is time consuming.  I’m not yet sure what the solution will be.

We have a lot of emphasis on using plain language at work. Despite my best efforts, some things always slip through. For my current work I have a group of volunteers from our target audience who are reviewing the content as I develop it. Their feedback on the level of language and the particular vocabulary we use is so useful. They are our jargon watchdogs, and I appreciate their help with this. It’s easy (for me) to develop a blind spot for these things once familiar the content.