Accessibility is a right. Morally and legally, we at Lantra need to ensure folks are not struggling to access our course materials.
The land-based sectors we cover will have a significant percentage of Learners who will have an accessibility issue, such as dyslexia. It is not just Learners that we need to think about, Lantra staff and Instructors may also have their own issues with accessibility.
Stephanie Harold (Lantra’s Head of Product Development) set up the Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility Team within the Product Development Team. This team’s role is to work with other colleagues to look at ways of improving our products, with dyslexia being our current focus. We have contacted dyslexia organisations for advice and have talked with dyslexic staff and Instructors to gather their feedback.
Our E-Learning courses are areas where we have really been able to bring accessibility to the front. Our new courses have used the sans serif font and increased font size to make them easier to read, and the layout of the text has been changed to make them more accessible.
Our Rodent Management E-Learning is the first where we have rolled out the ability to choose the background colours for slides. Our developers use a contrast checker to ensure the readability of text on the coloured backgrounds. We avoid using certain coloured text, especially red and green as these colours are inaccessible to a variety of people with learning difficulties. Additionally, we avoid mouse-only requirements to access courses so that we can support Learners with coordination difficulties.
We also make best use of sound. Our E-learning courses have a voice-over, which helps Learners who might find reading the text difficult. Where possible, we will be recording human voiceovers instead of using the text-to-speech function, which helps with expression and understanding. We have also been looking into other programmes that might support Learners accessing our E-Learning.
Some of our printed documents are printed in A5, however in future, we will be avoiding this where we can. Work is underway to bring accessibility to face-to-face materials through producing online versions of Lantra’s technical guides. This will allow us to bring in more features than the printed documents allow. Similarly, where courses have PowerPoint presentations, these are being created using the same guidelines as the E-Learning courses.
If you have any ideas or would like to discuss accessibility issues, please contact Morgan.Bruton@lantra.co.uk.
View our E-Learning courses here.