eLearning Accessibility Audit Services

Host: Thank you so much everyone for attending our webinar, the accessibility traps to avoid as a Rise user and how to fix them fast. Today we have Neil Cole who will be hosting our webinar. He is an accessibility and inclusion specialist and I'm just going to read off a bit of Neil's story that he provided me. He is a native of Salisbury, New Brunswick but he moved to Fredericton for university and he never left. So he is now living in Fredericton with degrees in political science and philosophy. He has taught uh art students at UNB for 13 years and is now working at knowledge now. He is also an academic adviser in student success for the last 10 years and he um touches a lot of aspects of education and teaching uh as he works with knowledge now. He is our in-house accessibility specialist. We value him so much and all the work he does with our clients, some of which are here today because they just love him. And I'm excited for him to meet all of you and for you to learn just as much uh as we do uh on a daily basis about accessibility. So take it away Neil. We are so excited for this webinar.

Neil Cole: Excellent. So let's get clicked over here. So Shannon introduced me but I want to take another minute or two of your time um to say yes I am Knowledge Now's accessibility and inclusion specialist. And this is a role that grew organically out of the work we were doing with some of our earliest clients as an incorporated company and a couple of them are here too which is exciting. I was first hired as a contractor to assist some experienced instructional designers with their work. But my quick my role quickly evolved to fill a need that we had as a company and that was to ensure that we were building or that we are building accessible, inclusive and equitable e-learning experiences. And since 2020, we have developed hundreds of accessible and inclusive e-learning courses for colleges, universities, nonprofits, government agencies, and corporate training as well. It's what we do. It's what we do well. Um, that's that's uh that's what we hear from our clients and other folks. And it's really exciting to know that we do this well. And although I specialize in in accessibility and inclusion at Knowledge Now, we do it as a team and so it's exciting to be able to work with a team that is committed to accessibility and inclusion in all the work we do. So, let's get into it.

Here's our agenda for today. I'm going to talk about four key issues um that end up potentially creating conformance errors uh or failures are sometimes called color contrast transcripts narrations and image descriptions and alt text. So we're going to talk about those two things together and uh at the end uh we will have time for questions and before uh so not before after the webinar sorry we are going to send some resources to folks we'll have a couple documents and uh we're going to send a little rise course with some of the resources included in it some links to some of the stuff I talk about in terms of WCAG and a couple activities that you can use to practice some of your skills, particularly around um writing alt text and image descriptions and I'm I'm really looking forward to showing you in the RISE course how we do that and allowing folks who might be uh growing their skills with image description and ALT text to to be able to practice that in a in a low stakes environment with some guidance based on our own examples and our in our guidelines that we use for ourselves. So the first trap in accessibility is low color contrast. Um it is one of the most common uh accessibility compliance errors. So I'm going to show you the WCAG criteria um that are relevant to color contrast. U but you'll get more information about later so you don't have to worry about uh understanding the theory behind these. And really, it's more it's going to be more important what I show you how to identify color contrast and and uh ways to understand it. Um these are the WCAG criteria. Um they they're all double A and AAA. Um but they're important considerations. Um, you do need to make sure you pass level double A WCAG criteria for most conformance uh reporting. um you know whether that's for AODDA or ADA in the United States or a client uh who is in a jurisdiction that relies on WCAG or just wants to have WCAG as a baseline uh or a guide for accessibility and inclusive e-learning. Um, so as an e-learning professional, whatever your role is, or even as someone working at your own organization, probably your biggest constraint will be brand colors, um, low contrast brand colors. So you may have to work with a branding team or a marketing team or whoever is selecting the colors for your project to convince them to make a few alternate color selections to ensure a good high contrast. There are two primary color checkers. I'm going to show one of them, web aim, because it's my favorite and I'm going to show you why it's my favorite. And so you can look at contrast finder later if you like to see how it's different and the and the one specific tool component that it does differently than web aim but let's let's take a look at it right now. So I'm going to close this. This is web aim the contrast checker. uh we will give you this web link. It's a it's a very basic tool but quite powerful for how simple it is. You can copy and paste text code into here or you can use the color swatch with their own color picker. Um so I'm I'm going to use my desktop background to just pick a couple random colors. We're going to go with that one and then Okay, that's way too low. That doesn't good. That's not a good example. Let's Let's pick something darker. Here we go. There's a half decent example so it gives you a contrast ratio down here. It tells you what the ratio is in terms of how that is calculated uh for WCAG compliance. And it tells you what it passes and fails for normal text, large text, and these graphical objects or user interface components. So the stars representing a graphic and the user interface components would be this border. I'm not sure if you can see it on the screen share, but there's a little border here, which is the same color as this text. I don't think it's necessarily important that you that you have the WCAG criteria memorized because it's all explained down here in terms of the ratios that you need and for what level they're used at. And then this paragraph here is also explaining how large text is text is defined for WCAG criteria. So it's it's really that simple for using this. There's one other aspect that makes this a really good tool for reporting. It's this perma link button. It's not exactly a button, but it's a perma link. You click it and it generates a web earl that you can now use to put in a report or to send someone to show them, hey, these these are how these colors are measured by WCH standards. So, you know, you might have to convince someone to lighten lighten this blue or darken this grey to get a higher contrast for your normal text. It's that simple. So, we're going to move back back to the presentation. I'll just mention color pickers quickly. I usually use it's called color picker. Color picker, sorry. It's free for Mac from the Apple App Store. Um, a popular one I've seen used is the color picker eyropper, which is a Chrome extension, but all the web browsers have color picker extensions. Um, you can also use built-in color pickers from various apps and programs and they will generally uh produce a hex code or an RGB code that you can use um and then copy and paste that into web aim or into contrast finder. If you're if you're using the Mighty plugin in Rise you do have to pay to use Mighty, but it it adds a color picker into Rise. Rise itself does not have a color picker. We don't we don't know why, but Mighty obviously filled a gap by building in a color picker into their extension, and it it works really well. So trap number two is having no transcripts for audio or videos, particularly videos that don't have captions. So again, I'm going to show you the relevant WCAG criteria. Um, and then I'm going to show you the tool that we use at Knowledge Now. It's called Sonics AI. And uh, I'll go over a few tips for creating quality transcripts. And the reason I'm going to go over those tips is because you can't rely on the AI to be perfect. uh it will make mistakes and so you do have to identify those and fix those uh so that you have a high quality transcript to ensure accessibility and inclusion. Uh I find this is particularly relevant in my experience working with some indigenous and first nations focused projects where the AI stumbles on non-English or or non-typical words and it tries to convert them into something. it it it guesses at what it thinks the spelling should be and it doesn't always guess consistently either and I'm going to show you that. Um, so the WCAG criteria here, it's the very first one, non-ext content, uh, that applies to, uh, images and audio and video. It's usually applied to images for alt text, but it actually applies to video and audio as well. that anything that isn't text has to have a text alternative and we obviously always call that all text for short. Um, so if your video doesn't already have captions, such as a YouTube video or something that you've prepared on your own through Beyond or Storyline or some other tool, you will have to make sure that you prepare a transcript for that. If you're grabbing a video from the internet that doesn't have captions, um, which is common with Vimeo, some people put their videos up on Vimeo, and Vimeo doesn't have auto captioning the way YouTube does. Um, and even sometimes you might want to uh prepare a transcript besides YouTube's autogenerated captions because they they also make errors that you might want to fix and and give learners the the alternative for downloading and screen reading and transcript. So, we use Sonx AI. As I said, um, most transcribing tools are probably pay to use, but they might give you a certain number of minutes for free. You know, like 300 minutes, which is a lot. That's 5 hours. Um, some will be less. You know, maybe you'll get 60 minutes of transcribing that you can get for free until you have to pay for an account. Um, but most services are going to require an embed code or a file that you upload. And so this presents some challenges with certain archive videos or web players that don't have an embed code or a download option. Um, one example that I've run into issues with is CBC archives using some old news stories for a particular course. Um, you can't download the video. There's no embed code button. You can sh you can share the video in a couple ways now, but you still can't grab the the link you need the way you can from YouTube or Vimeo or a few other services. So, you may have to find a way around that or find an alternative video to use. Um, but that's beyond the scope of our discussion today for looking for alternative ways to to get those videos. It can be done, but that's another webinar. So, let's go to Sonics. I'll show you how it what it looks like. Okay. So, this is this is the video I chose. It's it's uh I already did the transcript. So, there's some steps to go through for loading the transcripts. And it's very simple. It's not complicated. Uh, but I want to show you how to fix up your transcripts, how to understand how they work and make them uh really good quality. So, this is the video, Chief Redbear Children's Lodge. It's uh kind of a promotional news announcementish video for Kowas's First Nation around uh the Chief Red Bear Children's Lodge and the the child care law that they were able to launch. Um, so one of the cool things in here is whenever you click on a word or select a word, it's going to drop you in the place of the video. So if you clicked play, I'm not going to bother with that today, but if you clicked play, you can then click on words and it will move you to where that video is. Uh what you need to do is identify who your speakers are. Um you can then edit those and then select your speaker. So if you had a longer transcript, this one only has six speakers. It says technically it's only five. Um but you can then change the speaker, select it there, and it will automatically update to who the speaker is. Now, in this example, speaker one and two is actually the same person, but he's in two different contexts. So, he is uh he is speaking outside at a news conference in this second block. So, his voice sounds a little bit different and the AI thinks it's a different person. So, you know, you would you would change that to speaker one. Um that's one way to manage your transcripts. Uh, next is when I was talking about how certain words such as cowasus, that's the name of the First Nation community. It gets it right the first time, which is funny that it then doesn't get it right again at all after that. So here it it spells it this way. Um, it spells it this way. Here it uses cows. Just the word English word cows down here. There are a few other aspects of the grammar and the punctuation that you may want to look at to make sure it's clear and properly transcribed. And you may have to do some punctuation and other spelling edits for a really good cleaned up transcript. And in some cases, where are the words that I want? Uh, cookums and mushrooms. So, cooks isn't quite right, but it's closer than mushrooms. So, cooks and mushrooms are are grandmothers and grandfathers. Um, and this transcribing tool doesn't know that. It doesn't know that the that's what those words mean. And so, it has taken mushrooms and transcribed it as mushrooms. So, you do have to look for those kinds of things that show up in certain transcripts. Make those fixes. And then when you're done, you can export. Uh, because you want your transcript to be screen readable. I recommend a word document that guarantees that a screen reader will be able to read your transcript. Um, and then you've got different timecod and formatting options. Um, you should always have time codes included at the start of every paragraph. So that's when the when a speaker changes it, it is saying when in the transcript the speaker is changing. Um, you could also turn on or off including time codes for every whatever time interval you set. The default is 30 seconds and I do believe that's a fairly standard uh practice for transcripts so that uh someone who is reading the transcript in parallel to the video they're watching, they can match what they're reading with what they're seeing in the video. um you know the the the press conference or whatever it might be, whoever's speaking, you want the learner to be able to place the two things together in sync if they are watching the video and reading the transcript. So that is that's Sonx AI. Back to the presentation. Okay, so our next accessibility trap is no narrations. This more addresses a universal design approach, but it does fit within WCAG's principles of p perceivability. I almost didn't say that right. Perceivability of content for all learners. You want content to be able to be accessible to different kinds of learners, no matter what their disability might be. And so if you've prepared a video that has text on screen, you may want to have that narrated. And if if you are working on a project that doesn't have a budget for voiceover artists, you can use something like 11 Labs. It's really good for storylines that are embedded in your Rise course, but also for adding some some flare, some some panache, I'll call it that, to certain courses. If you've got a a a block of text, um you know, maybe it's a quote from a document, um you might want to have that narrated so that it just adds another way for learners to engage with that content so that it's it's readable, but also someone can listen to it. Uh just make sure I don't lose all my speaking points here. Um so 11 labs that's what we use. It is AI assisted generation for of text to speech. Uh so you put your text in I'll show you that and it generates audio. Uh it's a fantastic tool for producing audio narrations uh and voiceovers. You get 10,000 credits for free each month. Um, and one character equals one credit for most of the voice models, but there's actually a discount for some of them. And so if you uh need more credits, you know, you your project has more than 10,000 characters and you need more credits, their pricing options are actually really good and they often have discounts. So like, you know, you can end up paying like five bucks for, you know, 50,000 credits or something like that. Um, I do recommend that if you are using 11 Labs and you need more than 10,000 credits that you over buy. Uh, because you may need to regenerate certain bits of text for for new audio. And I'll talk about why that is in a moment. So, if you're using 11 Labs, it has a lot of voice options. And the reason we like 11 Labs is because although they're AI generated voices, they're very natural sounding. Uh we've probably all heard AI speech uh voiceovers on YouTube videos or or Instagram or Tik Tok reels and so on. You can tell a lot of these voices are are robotic. They sound robotic in their tone and their cadence. There's no inflection. and it's very monotonous and and often it's the exact same voice used over thousands of videos uh probably millions of videos at this point. Um but 11 Labs uh has lots of voices. There's uh several default libraries you can pick from uh with with default voices, but there's then a whole set of additional voices outside of the default libraries that you can add in. you'll have three slots uh that you can add other voices in. If you need more than three additional voices, you will have to filter through your slots. Uh but the options that you have available for you include a lot of different accents, tones, intonation, and inflection. Uh there are male and female voices, and you can play around with a lot of the speed and variability of your voiceovers. Now there are some challenges but there are ways to overcome them. So primary challenge might be pacing. Uh the voice might be reading your text too fast or it might be a little monotonous. So you can slow it down and you can increase the variability so that it doesn't sound as robotic in terms of the monotony of pace. Um, so sometimes you will get something, you'll put some text in, you'll get a narrated, and it'll read like a long a big long runon sentence. Um, and there's a couple strategies you can use to add spaces, pauses in in the text so that the voice will slow down. And you can customize the length of those pauses as well. Pronunciation is a challenge. It sometimes gets words wrong. Um, it'll sometimes get a word right and then start reading it wrong later on and then it won't change back to the correct pronunciation. So, sometimes you just have to spell a word phonetically and if it's an atypical word, sometimes you have to mess around with a lot of different phonetic or guessing at phonetic spellings to get it pronounced things right. Pronouncing things right. Um, I think most of their voices have been fixed for those errors. Um, but you'll probably find it pronounces something wrong once in a while. Uh, it happens with numbers, equations, and units of measurement sometimes as well. It might read certain units of measurement correctly. Um, other ones it might not. If you have a math equation, you may want to spell out things like multiplied and divided by instead of using x as a multiplied symbol. Um, because it'll probably read that as an x. So, it'll be like 2x8 equals 16. Uh, and you don't want to have that showing up. It does use more of your credits, but it's better to use a few more credits to spell that word out than have to regenerate the entire piece of text and use all those credits over again. So, I'm going to show you 11 maps. Okay. I I have a bit of text in here. Uh I want to show you these these are the settings available to you. Most of the time the they do change depending on the voice model you pick. When we started using this there was only one voice model but now there there are quite a few including u more than just English other languages. You can see there are 29 additional languages in addition to these three. uh these if it says 50% cheaper you that means you're using fewer credits per character. So your your credits go longer um and you've got a a character um tally down here at the bottom. So you can pick different voice models. Uh this one is the new one. It's in testing. So it says alpha. It's a research preview. Um, and it's what gave me these two separate generations. You have a history that's in here. So, if you lose one of your audio files, don't regenerate it. Save your credits. Find it in your history and you can reddownload it. Um, this shows you the details of the text and you can press the play button. So uh let let's listen to this audio here. This is an example of AI assisted texttoech generated text. Audio clips in your course could include text to speech like this including poignant statements that you might want to emphasize. I'm not going to bother playing the whole thing. There's there's more to it for the example I used here, but I I uh also did it in the Liam voice and I used the alpha to get two different generations. I'm going to show you how those sound different. This is an example of AI assisted texttospech generated text. Audio clips in your course could include text to speech like this, including poignant statements that you might want to emphasize. So that's generation one. You may have seen the player going. This is number two. Same voice, same text. This is an example of AI assisted texttospech generated text. Audio clips in your course could include text to speech like this, including poignant statements that you might want to emphasize. So, they're a little bit different. Um, you can play around with this enhance alpha button in in the version three and it will add little tags like this and you can either decide to undo or keep them. Uh, this is pretty neat because you're getting two generations for the price of one. Um, and then that allows you to pick between two files that you might want to use and they will both show up in your history. Uh, which is pretty neat. Um, depending on the voice model you pick, you'll get a bunch of different default voices. You can scroll through these. They have names. Um, and you'll get descriptions. Uh, you don't get to see the whole description. That's something I think they need to fix in in their tool here, but it gives you a little bit of a a preview of what the voice might be like. And you can click the play button to to see what it sounds like. Work while you have the light. You are responsible for the talent that has been entrusted to you. She tore her gaze away from her ruined footwear. Still very much grieving the loss and set herself to the task of finding a dry place to stand. So that allows you to preview voices to make some some selections. I do have to caution you that what you narrate, what you get it to narrate doesn't always sound the way the preview does. So that voice Liam that I used earlier, his preview is is more rushed sounding, a little bit jarring in his tone, but it's much calmer and smoother when it generates an actual uh audio file of your text. So that is that is 11 laps. Uh there's there's some things that you can play around in with it and it can be a little bit of fun picking different voices for for different voiceovers for different videos. Um did that on a on a client project. We had different speakers in the same uh video that we were videos that we were preparing. So I got to go through the library and and pick different voices. Uh so let's get into our fourth trend. Uh no image descriptions are all text. This is the most common conformance or compliance error with WCAG accessibility checks. Um not having alt text for images. Uh I think in a in a check of the top 1 million websites uh in an audit of them over half were failed this criteria and this is the the very first criteria 1.1.1 in WCAG. Um, so what I'm going to do is go through an unconscious bias activity and then we'll talk about uh these different topics at a kind of overview conceptual level because I'll be sending resources for you to dive into them more. So for for the unconscious bias activity, um, I'm going to show you a description and I want you to think about it. What does the description evoke in your mind? and then I'll show you the image. So, we don't have to vote on anything or put anything into the chat. Just whatever comes to your mind. So, first description is a business leader. What do you think about when you hear or read a business leader? Was it a woman? Was it a woman of color? And you don't have to answer that. That's just a That's just a reflective question. So, next one. An airplane mechanic. What comes to mind when you hear or see or think about who an airplane mechanic might be? I cheated a little bit and picked another woman of color. Uh, but did anyone imagine a woman of color as an airplane mechanic? an industrial machine operator. So, what do you think about when you hear or read an industrial machine operator? What comes to mind here? Did you picture someone who might have a disability and uses a wheelchair? Um, now I did pick another person of color, um, three in a row, but it's because he's using a wheelchair. That's why I selected this color. I thought that was a really good example of how, uh, how our our unconscious biases might not be reflected in some people's actual lived experiences. Um, so this is this is a man who works in an actual uh fabrication workshop and he uses a wheelchair. Um, and he's he's able to do his job. So, this one might evoke all kinds of different images depending on what your experience is with university, but university friends. What do you think of when you hear or see the words university friends? So, I grabbed this picture of a group of friends posing for a photo. Um, we've got some young men and women and we've got some ethnocultural diversity here. Um, so the reason why I I did this and I've done this several times with different presentations is that it's important for us to recognize that unconscious bias exists and we don't want to replicate it in our e-learning experiences. Um, don't judge yourselves for having unconscious bias. We all have unconscious biases. uh we've learned them from from school, from work, friends, family, TV, books, and so on. Um we're exposed to our unconscious biases as aspects of uh dominant aspects of our culture. Um so here in Canada, we live in a patriarchal, heteronormative, able-bodied, and white dominant culture. So our our unconscious biases are reflective of those aspects and that's not meant to be judgmental or any way. It's just the way our culture is produced and reproduced and we want to foster inclusion at the same time as accessibility. So we need to include the other people who exist in our society in our culture in the images we select for courses. And then when we describe those images for accessibility, we need to be representing who they are as well. And so there are some strategies to do that. And that's what I'm going to talk about next here. Well, actually, I'm not going to talk about it next. I'm going to show you the WCAG criteria. Sorry. Uh so as I said before uh this is the the WCAG criteria that applies to images but also video and audio as anything that's not text. It is the first and among the most important success criteria. It is also one of the most frequent errors as I've said. Um, and also repeating that it applies to all non-ext objects that are in your courses, but for right now we're going to focus on image descriptions and alt text. So, skin tone scale is an important one. Um, it's recommended by Accessible Publishing Canada and it's about describing the spectrum of skin tones that that we have as humans. This is just a representation of the scale. There are definitely more than seven skin tones. Um, and but we use these five indicators of light, medium, light, medium, medium, dark, and dark. So we we describe the physical representation uh the physical expression of people's skin tone using those descriptions in alt text and image descriptions. Um we don't use black, brown or white. Those are actually socioultural descriptions of skin tone. Um and we don't use all of red or yellow either. Um, two of those generally have pjorative origins. Uh, and olive, um, I always complain about is nonsense to me. Um, olives are green and brown and black and kind of purplish and skin doesn't look like olives. Um, we also don't use fair. Um, that's kind of more of a narrative way of describing skin tone or swary. We don't use that kind of word either. we focus on this spectrum that is on the screen. Um, and the guide that that we will send you after the webinar is going to talk about this in more depth with more examples. But skin tone doesn't look like this in real life. It looks like this. Uh it's influenced by lighting, by color, you know, what our clothes uh the clothes we're wearing, how that might juxtapose against our skin tone, how different people's skin tones adjacent to each other may influence uh whether you describe someone as having light or medium light skin tone. And this also shows why we don't use the socio cultural descriptions of of skin tone because uh people from the same cultural backgrounds fit in different places on that skin tone spectrum. Someone from a year European background can be anywhere from light to to medium. Uh folks who have uh who are black can be medium medium dark or dark. uh folks from different parts of Asia can fit almost anywhere on the skin tone spectrum. So, um it's really just meant to be a guide to represent the diversity of of humanity. Um and I I believe that's one of the great things of being human is our diversity. It is a strength. Um it is it adds richness, cultural richness, social richness to who we are as people. And so we need to include and represent the folks who are shown in the images that we describe. So the same goes for gender. Um and it's important to describe the genders that are shown in images. And so that does include man, woman, male, female. And depending on the way you're describing an image will change what whether you're using man, woman or male, female. Um, but we also need to include LGBTQI A2S+. That's quite a mouthful it's become, but it is very inclusive of the the spectrum of sexuality and gender, the way it is expressed because like skin tone, our our sexuality and sexual orientation and gender is expressed on a spectrum. And so we need to describe the people who are included in our im images uh in terms of what their gender is is how it's being expressed. Now that also includes nonb binary individuals, gender that might not be known um and using they them uh where appropriate. Um, it's it's important that we use genderneutral language in the text of our courses, but it's just as important that we use genderinclusive language in the images because you want to uh explain to people who can't see the image who is shown in it. So that those who can see it and those who can't see it are getting an equivalent equitable uh learning experience. When it comes to describing sex and gender, I have a few different strategies that I use. One of them is alphabetically. U but I don't always like to rely on alphabetical description because that always puts men first in terms of just just the way the alphabet works. You could also describe people in in images from left to right or clockwise depending on how people or are oriented in an image and uh whatever works for for that. Shannon's giving me a time check, I bet. Okay, I'm almost done. Shannon, uh disability language is also important. Um there there are person first and identity first ways of describing people with disabilities. Both are correct, neither are wrong. It really depends on the organization and the population group. It's important to recognize that disability is not a bad word. You want to include people with disabilities and you want to refer to them correctfully correctly and respectfully. So you don't say someone suffers from a disability. um they they suffer from living in a society that doesn't respect their disability. Um so you don't say someone is confined to a wheelchair, you say they use a wheelchair. Um just a word of caution uh about inappropriate terms and words to use. We don't like using differently aabled people of all abilities, special needs, handicapped, and some similar terms. Some of these are well-meaning, but they're ableist terms and they can be very condescending to people with disabilities. So, we we focus on describing their disability accurately, but also respectfully. Okay, I'm going to wrap it up real quick, Shannon. We want to save time for your questions, but I do have these two two things to get through here. So, um, when you're writing image descriptions and alt text, you want to, uh, keep the factors in mind that I just discussed, and my guide talks about it in more depth for you. You want to look at trying to use the object, action, context method. So, who's in the image? What are they doing, and where are they doing it? Or describe general to specific details. And you can often combine those two methods together. When it comes to infographics, charts, maps, things like that, you need to describe all of the information that are that are in those. You can't leave details out because then that means you are creating an inaccessible exclusionary learning experience. Someone who can't see that infographic, they need to have all the content in it described to them so they get the same information as someone who can see the infographic. Uh if you're using image descriptions, uh don't duplicate your image description as the alt text. Use use descriptive alt text, which I'll show uh briefly. Um and if you use a long image description, your alt text should still be there, but it should describe the medium of the image, whether it's a photograph, an infographic, a map, a chart, so on. And when it comes to the very long image descriptions for things like maps and infographics, very complex interactions where you need to describe what what someone is doing uh you know maybe in a presentation. Uh the best strategy for those is to use an image full width or an image centered block in rise and then put your image description into an accordion below that image and then label that that accordion appropriately linked to whatever your image is. That ensures that the description is there so it's accessible for those who can't see the image. Um, but it's tucked away so it's not intruding on the overall learning experience. Um, so it's it's a way to balance accessibility and inclusion with visual design. And you'll see what that looks like in the RISE course that I send afterward. So, uh, I can leave it at that to make sure we cover questions, but I do have some examples here. And maybe what I'll do is, uh, well, I already planned on it. I was going to have these examples in the Rise course for you folks and depending on how much time for questions, how many questions we have to go over, maybe I'll still show a couple of these.

Host: So, thank you Neil for that. That was a lot of detail and you jam-packed everything in there that I think we need to learn and understand. Uh we have one question uh so far from Nina. I don't know if Nina wants to come off um mute and ask her a question, but she said uh something about using can't we use black? Nina, did you want to

Participant: yeah, sorry for interrupting, but uh everywhere in Canada, so I'm I'm now in Canada. So everywhere in Canada, Black Lives Matters, Black Month, and so on. Why uh why can't we use it in al text or it is because online courses uh not for only for the users in Canada so that's why we should use dark but because I think black is a very common words for the black people.

Neil Cole: Yep. It is. Thank you. Um, and it's it's something that you'll have to think about balancing in terms of the project that you're working on and what is being described. Um, black is more of a socio-cultural description because folks who are black do have a a wide spectrum of how their skin tones look. Um, and it it is it's not inappropriate to use black as well as white if you are using that term in your courses. It's one of the things that's important to consider is is capitalizing the B on black, whether that's in the the text of the course or in the descriptions themselves. Um, for those who uh might be reading descriptions, not just using screen readers, it's it's one of the considerations to use. One of the exceptions that I didn't mention that we that we use, we don't apply the skin tone scale to indigenous folks in the images that we describe. We we either say indigenous, first nations, Inuit, matei. Um, and you can apply that same exception appropriate to your project for for black folks as well. um uh if you know that they're from Africa, you know, you could describe what their location is. Or from Asia, you can describe what their location is as well. Um so there there are nuances that apply to these things. And navigating those nuances are some of those instructional design choices that that you need to navigate and apply to your project as as it applies most appropriately. And sometimes the skin tone scale doesn't apply for a particular kind of project. Sometimes your client doesn't want to use it. We have had that. We've had clients who don't want to use the skin tone scale and we we've had to go with that because that's it's their project. That's what they've decided. We have to do our best to uh balance accessibility, inclusion, and client uh desires, needs, or wants. I hope that answers your question.

Host: Thank you. Thank you. A quick side note to everyone, we are recording this session and we will be sending you a link to that recording as soon as it is uploaded. So, you can share that with others that you think might be interested and we encourage you to share. Uh we'll also have uh some bonus content for you in an email that we're sending out. um also uh a landing page with a ton of information on accessibility. So there are some resources that we're excited to share and uh they will live on from this webinar. I don't have any other questions at this time, but if anyone wants to raise their hand and they have another question, please uh please go ahead. Don't be shy. And if not, uh, we might bring up a couple of questions just with Neil's experience and some of the clients that he's worked with, um, and just within the community. Have you heard people ask like are there some common questions, Neil, that that people have come to you with?

Neil Cole: Yeah, we have we have several different kinds of common questions. One of them is um when to use image descriptions versus alt text. And I didn't really cover that. Uh but there are there are different times to use image descriptions or alt text. Uh and different clients are going to have different desires. um we're we're working in an environment that is becoming more open to accessibility so that seeing image descriptions on a screen is is becoming more accepted. It's it's not being treated as something that that detracts from or intrudes upon the e-learning experience. So whenever you have complicated images uh you you need to use an image description to describe those. That's particularly applicable for maps and infographics. And what we've learned from several clients when they have learners who who aren't blind, uh they can see the image, they still often report enjoying the experience of having that description because it helps them interpret the information. So what an image description does for these complex graphics, infographics, charts of things, it it is supporting a universal design for learning approach. So that there's there's the picture of it for those who can see it, but then there's the the text description of it. Even if you can see the image, it allows more learners more ways to interact with the content. Thank you. Another one that I I literally I thought about when I was talking and I forgot what it is. Sorry. There's so many things.

Host: There are there are many. Okay. Well, if no one else has any other questions, I think we'll leave it at that. And uh if anyone has um comments or they want to email us um after we send out our email today with um the well the recording will not be sent out until tomorrow. But uh if you have any questions, please message us on LinkedIn uh through knowledge now and we'd be happy to answer your questions. Um, we're looking at having more of these webinars in the future. This is the first of a series of webinars, not all about accessibility, uh, specifically, but we will be talking about different subjects that, uh, are interesting to the e-learning community. And, uh, we're excited to share those with you. Next month we'll be talking about um migration a successful LMS migration and modernization strategy. So look out for uh more information on that. Perfect. Thanks so much everyone and I hope you have a great rest of the day. Thanks for attending.