Scenarios and Solutions: An Instructional Designer’s Perspective on Creating Accessible Courses

The popularity of online education continues to increase, with many institutions offering courses to students worldwide. With online student numbers rising year on year, learner profiles are more diverse than were previously possible, but this has brought with it unique challenges relating to accessing, interacting with, and generating course content. Course content creators, and Instructional Designers in particular, are uniquely positioned to work with Subject Matter Experts (SME) such as faculty to design accessible content for a variety of learner profiles. Before one can implement accessible content design, it is necessary to become aware of the barriers certain leaners face when accessing online courses. This session presents common accessibility challenges from a selection of different courses as a set of scenarios, based on real-world situations, and describes how the particular accessibility issue was solved. Further recommendations for approaching accessibility in course design are provided for Instructional Designers and other content creators.