Overview of Section 508 Compliance
Section 508 of the Workforce Rehabilitation Act is a law that provides federal agencies to make their websites and online content accessible to visually impaired users. The law includes a set of technical standards establishing requirements for software applications, operating systems, web-based content, videos, and multimedia products.
Designing a section 508 compliant training course
Section 508 Compliant eLearning courses are designed in such a way that it makes it easy-to-access by disabled learners.
Instructional designers may often find Section 508 Compliance training a bit challenging. Accessibility issues should be kept in mind while developing storyboards and should be addressed from the beginning of the design process. It starts becoming complex with alt text, tabbing, transcript, and color contrast. The accessibility issues need to be kept into consideration to avoid complexity and confusion in development.
Here are some tips to design and develop eLearning courses.
- Avoid events where the learner has to click multiple links.
- Make navigation easy and consistent.
- Provide alternative text for all elements – buttons, images, hyperlinks, etc.
- Provide short keys to navigation buttons like Next, Previous, Play, Pause, Exit, etc.
- Learners with visual and hearing impairments cannot fully take advantage of multimedia-based eLearning courses. It is necessary to provide a text transcript describing interactions that supplement the visual information.
- Make sure the information is structured and partitioned into manageable chunks.
- Colours should be used considering colour-blind users.
- Include an accessible menu for easy navigation between sections or screens.