All About LXD: How do you Design with Accessibility in Mind?

Imagine it’s your first day at your dream job. Your manager sends you a mandatory online training course about your company’s HR practices to complete. Excited to get started, you open the course and find that you can’t understand the content. You have a vision disability, and the words on the page are difficult to make out. What would you do?

Accessibility Legislation

The provision for most physical accommodations for people with disabilities is enforced by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Effective June 2024, the DOJ revised the ADA to establish specific requirements for making accessible services, programs, and activities offered by state and local government entities through web and mobile applications. Though, even with advances in technology, digital accessibility is still an evolving field. 

In 2017, a final ruling was passed updating accessibility requirements for information and communication technology (ICT) covered by Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and Section 255 of the Communications Act. However, only the federal sector is bound by these requirements. This means, there’s no guarantee that training courses (or any content) will be accessible to you if you need accommodation. Even within the federal sector, adherence is spotty at best. According to a 2024 report by the General Services Administration (GSA), only 23% of governmentwide public internet pages and 25% of public documents are fully accessible. 

GSA, who is tasked with ensuring 508 compliance, provides technical assistance to government agencies in complying with these requirements. The standards enforced by GSA are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). WCAG set specific considerations for content design and development. While the standards are wide-ranging, a quick reference guide can be found easily online. Under the standards, all web content must be perceivable, understandable, operable, and robust in a variety of specific categories. Failure to adhere to the standards is often attributed to the time and energy it takes to meet them.

What is Accessibility?

“The power of the Web is in its universality. 

Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.” (Tim Berners Lee)

As a creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners Lee understood the web needed to be accessible to everyone. Everyone deserves to have access to the information the internet provides. But what happens, when technology isn’t able to keep up with that promise? Web accessibility is used to keep the promise of universality. Web accessibility means that online content is designed and developed to allow access to anyone regardless of how they choose to access it. It ensures that those with disabilities, or those without, can always access information. 

Digital accommodations are the pathway to web accessibility. Accommodations can come in a variety of forms, and may be developed in the initial stages, or can be added later. Examples of accommodations can include closed captioning or transcripts of media, different navigation options, or providing voice to text transcription. However, they can also be as simple as using an easy to read font or ensuring colors fully contrast. While it’s not mandatory (anywhere except the federal sector), accessibility should be addressed because it benefits everyone. If you can make it easier for even a single user to access your content, you’ve accomplished something great. 

Web Accessibility in Learning & Development

If you’ve taken the time to create a course to teach a topic or skill, you want to ensure that the course is accessible to the greatest number of people possible. While 100% accessibility is not in the cards, there are many factors we put into place to allow people of varying abilities to access our training. The number one factor is creating content in different formats.

Remember that HR training course, the new employee couldn’t complete? That could have been prevented fairly easily. The course is a mixture of video animation, graphics, and onscreen text - which is pretty common in online learning. Video can be improved through closed captioning. Graphics should always have alternate text describing the image. And finally for onscreen text, the font should be no smaller than 14 point. As a package, a full transcript of the course should also be created. There’s no one size fits all approach, but these modifications may have allowed the new employee with a visual disability, to more easily access the content. 

Though simple fixes are important, as designers we should also strive to go further in our accessibility journey. Rather than amending a course at the end, we should think about it at the start. For instance, not all colors contrast with each other which is difficult for learners who are colorblind or have low vision. There are a number of tools online that can be used to quickly verify color contrast. Developing precise documentation with proper headings and formatting in place is also a way to think strategically about accessibility. Content can also be improved through the use of online tools, which are sadly difficult to use, but do provide pathways towards greater accessibility. 

What’s Next?

It’s easy to get swept up in accessibility, and want to design every feature perfectly. However, it’s not always possible without the proper tools and knowledge. But by choosing to design with accessibility in mind, you’ve taken the first step. When in doubt, try starting small. Even a tiny change in how you choose to create content, can change the way people think about learning. When in doubt, seek out experts in learning and development or universal design and accessibility, or better yet, those who use accessibility features regularly. They can provide a wealth of knowledge and ideas to design a more inclusive online learning experience for everyone. 

Check back soon to learn more about all things LXD!

*Originally published 07/28/25 (Eleven Peppers Studios blog).