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Accessibility by Design: Insights from dominKnow and eLaHub Founder Susi Miller
In 2025, having accessible content is critical.
Accessibility is so much more than a set of checkboxes. It’s your organization’s way of showing its commitment to meeting the needs of your entire audience, and removing barriers for a whole range of access needs.
We’ve come a long way from the days when “accessibility” meant “having a downloadable PDF.” But we’ve still got a long way to go, and much more to learn!
That’s why we hosted a webinar with eLearning accessibility expert Susi Miller, who founded eLaHub as a way to make learning accessible and inclusive for all. If you missed the live webinar, you can view the recording, or read on to find out more about how you can make your eLearning more accessible and inclusive in 2025.
Why do we need accessible content?
We can’t talk about accessibility without talking about disabilities. The UNCRPD defines disabilities as follows:
Focusing on barriers is vital when we think about accessibility. We’re all responsible for finding out what those barriers are and helping to remove them to enable equal access for all learners. Accessibility gives us the power to make a hugely positive impact on our learners.
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The joy of accessibility
As the founder of eLaHub, Susi’s vision is to make all learning accessible and inclusive by default. Susi’s work follows years in the public, private, and charity sectors, along with higher education.
Susi got into accessibility while she was teaching English literature in Zimbabwe. She had a student, Farisai, who was blind. Mercy, another girl in Susi’s class, helped Farisai by reading out her literature texts for her.
With no access to assistive technologies, having to solely rely on Mercy, was holding Farisai back. Thankfully, the school managed to provide Farisai’s texts in Braille, allowing her to read her own literature. This had a huge impact on Farisai, and she eventually passed her exams and trained to become a teacher herself – something Susi refers to as “the joy of accessibility.”
“Working with Farisai was one of the greatest privileges of my career. The experience forced me to reevaluate all of my assumptions about teaching and learning. It taught me to be more aware of the needs of my students and made me realize how important it was to be able to adapt to those needs, ultimately making me a better teacher.
Even more importantly, however, it made me rethink my attitude on disability. Working with Farisai showed me that her impairment in the form of blindness was not in itself something which disabled her. She was just as bright and capable as the other students in the class, but with strategies and accommodations which allowed her to become more confident and independent, she was able to fulfill her potential.”
Three business cases for accessibility
While creating content for learners with disabilities is the main priority, that doesn’t mean your other learners won’t benefit from accessible learning. Accessible content is broadly designed to include those with vision, hearing, motor and cognitive access needs, which encompass a vast range of conditions, such as color blindness, glaucoma, tinnitus, arthritis, Parkinson’s, ADHD, autism, epilepsy, anxiety, and so much more.
In fact, around 25% of employees self-identify as having a disability or health condition, so designing accessible learning content will benefit a much larger audience than you might think.
A good way to advocate for accessibility in your organization is to highlight some of the key business benefits.The top three benefits of accessibility that Susi presents in her work with organizations are:
- Ethical Benefit
Accessibility can help organizations improve their reputations. Excluding people unnecessarily—especially from learning and development opportunities at work—is not just unfair, it's unethical. In fact, this is enshrined in international law by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), with Article 9 specifically referring to IT and communication systems as a fundamental human right. The UN’s sustainable development goals, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2015, include goals around leaving no one behind. This includes those with disability explicitly included 11 times across 17 goals, with goal #10 specifically referring to reduced inequalities.
- Legal Benefit
International web accessibility laws and policies from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is underpinned by Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG. WCAG is a single shared standard for web content accessibility that meets the needs of individuals, organizations and governments. Meeting accessibility standards is a legal requirement for many organizations, and best practice for everyone else.
- Commitment to Inclusivity Benefit
Many organizations have programs that are aimed at making sure everyone has equal access with the goal of being truly inclusive. In short accessibility, should be a key part of any good inclusive strategy. In 2019, 90% of companies prioritized diversity, but only 4% of them considered disability as part of this.
The impact of accessible learning on learning practitioners
In her webinar, Susi revealed how accessible learning impacts the people who create it – learning practitioners.
While there are plenty of obvious benefits for learners themselves, building content with accessibility in mind is just as valuable for the L&D team!
- Creating accessible learning content = better learning practitioners
Learning how to make learning content accessible shifts the focus to the learner. It’s a transformational shift that centers the learner in the learning experience, and encourages practitioners to act with more empathy. It makes it impossible to create learning content without considering how learners will engage with it. Working with access needs personas helps learning practitioners understand the needs of their audiences.
- It forces you to challenge your existing practice
Creating accessible content moves your practice from doing things the way you’ve always done them to doing things in the way that is most beneficial to your learners. This could mean creating scripts for training videos, which can then be turned into transcripts and captions to make content creation both more efficient and more accessible.
- Designing for accessibility leads to innovation
Accessibility means innovation, not limitation. Your existing content may not be accessible, but the fun happens when you start looking for ways to make it accessible – for instance, ensuring content is compatible with keyboard users and screen readers.
Practical accessibility tips for learning practitioners
If you’re a learning practitioner just starting out with building more accessible eLearning content, you may be looking for some easy tips to get you up and running. Susi recommends the following tips for ensuring your current and future content is accessible, with no formal guidelines or standards required:
- Add an accessibility statement and organizational contact to all resources to show that you are committed to accessibility and inclusivity
- Use inclusive instructions to avoid making anyone feel excluded – for instance, “select” instead of “click”, and “enter” instead of “type”
- Avoid using text in ALL CAPS, as it’s 13-18% harder to read, and can be especially challenging for people with dyslexia
- Use imagery including every lens of DEI, including a range of access needs – not just the classic token stock image of someone in a wheelchair
- Use plain language to make text more accessible, using readability checkers (such as Hemingway or WebFX) to ensure that language is clear and straightforward, and generative AI tools like ChatGPT to refine copy where necessary
5 common WCAG fails and how to solve them
WCAG standards exist to support a wide range of accessibility needs, from visual to cognitive. What are the most common WCAG fails in accessibility audits, and how can you ensure your eLearning content is compliant?
- Poor color contrast
If the color contrast between your text and the background is too low, it will make content inaccessible for those with color blindness (also known as color vision deficiency). Using the WebAIM color contrast checker allows you to quickly check whether or not there is enough contrast between your chosen colors, and whether it’s WCAG compliant. If it’s not, the tool makes it easy to find colors with a higher contrast ratio.
If you often find yourself struggling to find suitable color pairings in your brand color palette, the EightShapes contrast grid will help you select the right tones for contrasting text and backgrounds, without upsetting your marketing team.
- Supplementing color-based information
Locking up crucial information in “color-alone” elements, such as green to denote a correct answer and red for an incorrect answer, also causes problems for people with colorblindness.
Applying a grayscale filter to your content will help you quickly see whether or not your content is accessible without color. Instead of relying on color alone, using additional devices such as text or icons to convey information ensures it’s accessible for those with colorblindness. - Inaccurate captions
Issues with captions, such as missing captions, a lack of synchronization, or inaccurate descriptions, are the number one barrier to equal access to workplace learning content, according to UK charity Scope.
Captions should be synchronized with what’s happening on screen, and should be descriptive, meaning they should capture relevant sound effects, who is speaking, and tone of voice. Auto-generated captions should be reviewed for accuracy, pace, and grammar, ensuring the correct content is accessible for deaf and hard-of-hearing learners. Last, make sure your chosen caption format is compatible with the devices and browsers your audience utilizes. If unsure, access our Video and Auditory tools resources for a Can I Use resource. - Inaccessible learning activities
Inaccessible interactions, such as drag-and-drop activities which can’t be completed with a keyboard or don’t provide enough information for a keyboard user who has a visual impairment, are a major barrier for those using assistive technologies to access learning. Ensuring that activities can be controlled via a keyboard ensures that people with motor access needs can complete them, without needing to use a mouse.
Activities like drag-and-drop activities are often inaccessible for keyboard users, so it’s best to either avoid using them, or to provide an accessible alternative. For instance, instead of dragging and dropping elements in a word-matching exercise, you could create an accessible version where learners can tab through checkboxes to match the word to the definition.
- More accessible moving content
Moving content with no learner control, such as videos or animations, can be difficult for people with cognitive and neurodivergent conditions, such as ADHD, autism, and dyslexia, to understand, or it can be distracting when they’re trying to follow other content on the screen.
The WCAG Pause, Stop, or Hide standard says that learners must be able to pause, stop, or hide any moving content lasting longer than five seconds – that means no auto-playing videos or gifs that can’t be stopped.
How to make your learning content accessible and inclusive
Accessibility can feel overwhelming at first. There are so many standards to learn and so much to remember, but as Susi says, we should be striving for progress over perfection. None of us will get it right the first time, but with each project, designing for accessibility will become second nature, and our learning content will become more and more accessible and inclusive over time.
In 2025, we should be embracing an “accessibility as default” mindset for all of our learning content. We should be promoting positive learning experiences for everyone, and part of that means ensuring that people with access needs feel considered and welcome – not like an afterthought.
How dominKnow | ONE supports accessibility
Choosing a learning content management system (LCMS) like dominKnow | ONE will help you create accessible eLearning content with a range of built-in tools and checkers.
dominKnow | ONE supports Section 508, WCAG 2.2 Level AA, and WAI-ARIA compliance, allowing you to create accessible content as standard. Choose from a range of WCAG-compliant themes, show or hide captions, add supportive accessibility text, and more, enabling you to support a diverse range of learners with different access needs.
In particular, dominKnow | ONE’s accessibility features makes it easy to see when content isn’t accessible, allowing you to address it immediately. During content authoring, elements which aren’t accessible enough, such as images without alt text or videos without captions, are flagged on screen. You can then jump right into the accessibility tab to improve the accessibility of your content, whether you’re already clued up on accessibility or just starting out.
Looking for some general help with accessibility? Access our collection of Accessibility Resources on our community site to learn more about accessibility and access numerous helpful tools and resources.
Want to experience how quick and easy it can be to create accessible, inclusive eLearning content that complies with all international standards? Start your free trial of dominKnow | ONE today for a first-hand insight.
