3 minute read
ACCESSIBILITY SPOTLIGHT
Which authoring tool shines brightest?
As a course designer, you know that producing accessible content is crucial to ensuring that all learners can access your materials without any barriers. However, with so many tools available in the market that claim to create highly accessible eLearning content, it can be difficult to determine which ones actually deliver on their promise.
To help instructional designers make an informed decision, an experiment was conducted to evaluate the accessibility of three leading industry tools: Articulate Storyline, Articulate Rise, and H5P. The experiment involved creating a near-identical course using each of these tools, featuring various multimedia elements such as text, images, videos, and a single interactive drag-and-drop activity.
To assess the accessibility of the courses, Google Lighthouse was used, which is a powerful auditing tool built into Google Chrome that provides detailed insights into various aspects of web pages, including accessibility, performance, progressive web apps, and SEO. This open-source tool simulates how web pages are experienced by users with disabilities and provides recommendations for enhancing accessibility.
While there are more comprehensive accessibility auditing tools available, the experiment aimed to create a simple and practical approach for anyone to quickly test their eLearning content’s accessibility. The assessment focused on each tool’s accessibility score out of 100 in the report generated by Google Lighthouse.
The results of the experiment revealed that Articulate Storyline scored 88% in the accessibility report, while Articulate Rise and H5P both scored a perfect 100%. Articulate Storyline showed some shortcomings in certain areas, including invalid ARIA roles, improper use of meta viewport attributes, and missing labels for form elements such as the video player. However, these accessibility issues can be resolved by customising the project or editing the HTML files after export.
In contrast, Articulate Rise’s user-friendly interface and responsive design capabilities seamlessly incorporate accessibility best practices, while H5P’s focus on creating interactive and accessible content has earned it top marks in the evaluation.
It is important to note that each tool has its strengths and weaknesses, and they should be used according to the specific use case. Articulate Storyline offers unique features that Rise and H5P cannot match, and with some customisation, it can achieve a much higher accessibility score than what was obtained in the experiment. Nonetheless, the results of the experiment demonstrate how much the eLearning industry has evolved in creating highly accessible content with minimal effort on the part of the designer.
In conclusion, creating accessible online learning is not merely a choice but a necessity in today’s digital age. The experiment’s findings indicate that instructional designers can confidently create eLearning content that is highly accessible and can hold its own in the battle of accessibility testing. While there is still room for improvement (even 100% can be improved upon as these accessibility tools don’t test everything), the progress made in the last few years is incredible. What a time it is to be a content creator.
