1. Awareness Training
Understanding the barriers readers face when trying to navigate or understand content is a key first step in creating a culture of accessibility and inclusion. Most people are unaware how little differences in digital content can create increased barriers for the intended audience. Our awareness training demonstrates how people use assistive technology to understand content. We show real-world examples of good and bad documents and review our simple handout “10 Things you can do to improve document accessibility without being an expert.” Our awareness training is designed to answer “Why” accessibility is important and give attendees actionable items they can start doing today to increase the accessibility of their digital content. This training typically lasts 60 minutes and would be designed to present to everyone across an entire organization as a whole. This can be done in multiple sessions or as one broadcast or live training. The benefit of a multi-sessions approach is that it facilitates discussion and Q&A.
2. Basic Training for Content Authors
The majority of accessibility stems from a well-crafted source document. These documents are primarily developed in Microsoft Word. Editors who employ solid basic authoring formats will create more accessible documents. Using styles, adding image descriptions, avoiding common pitfalls and understanding basic accessibility will dramatically reduce the amount of effort required further in the development process.
Our Accessibility for Microsoft Word and Accessibility for Microsoft PowerPoint classes are designed to give content authors basic design skills that will translate to major benefit when it comes to final design and translation into multiple languages. Our classes can be delivered in 3-hour and 6-hour formats. We would recommend these classes for anyone responsible for authoring Word and PowerPoint content.
3. Specialized Training for Content Creators
This category is targeted toward content creators that use Adobe InDesign to create accessible content. Once the authors have finished developing the copy and basic content the content creators take the document to the next stage and develop a polished document. Key knowledge is needed to understand how to maximize the accessibility features of Adobe InDesign to develop content that can often need very little additional work to meet WCAG 2.1, Level AA standards.
Our InDesign classes are delivered in 3 and 6-hour blocks. We recommend these classes for those who are responsible for design and final production of content. Class sizes should be no more than 15 people to maximize knowledge transfer and to ensure attendees have a sufficient questions and answers period.
4. Accessibility Training for Remediation/Testing
Final document accessibility is completed through Adobe Acrobat and other tools (CommonLook & axesPDF) to ensure the documents meet WCAG 2.1, Level AA compliance. We recommend specialized training for key accessibility champions who will be responsible for providing advanced support for documents that may not easily meet accessibility standards. Our Acrobat classes are delivered in 3 and 6-hour blocks.
We recommend these classes for those who are responsible for design and final production of content. Class sizes should be no more than 15 people to maximize knowledge transfer and to ensure attendees have a sufficient questions and answers period.
Private Accessibility Training Video Library
We know organization have many moving parts, teams and extended partners. It is for this reason we feel the development of an accessibility skills video-based training library is a key part of maintaining accessible content moving forward. We recommend a focused approach to developing short videos on specific topics that anyone can watch to learn key technique or answer questions related to accessibility understanding, content creation and design.
What do to next?
If you are ready to have a conversation about how these options fit into your organization fill out the form below and let's have a chat. We want to make sure you are on the right path for your organization. We know the questions to ask and have helped organizations just like yours who are know accessibility is something they need to start doing but do not know where to start.