Accessible Learning

Accessibility and Inclusion Best Practices

The Local Innovation grant from ACFE enabled us at Doveton Neighbourhood Learning Centre to put together a set of resources to support Learn Locals to adapt existing curriculum and learning resources.

Using accessibility best practices for in-person, online or blended delivery, these resources aim to help remove learning barriers and make content accessible for all, including neurodivergent, disabled and CALD learners.

This page contains the resources we produced during the project. All resource files open in a new tab.

What is Accessibility?

These resources explain what accessibility is and how to make your learning resources more accessible and inclusive.

Learning Preferences

The following resources cover learning preferences and the way people process information.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL)

Universal Design for Learning is a framework and set of guidelines that cater for the different ways people learn.

Readability

These resources explain the importance of making learning resources understandable by all learners, and how to make educational content more readable and inclusive.

Assistive Technology

These resources focus on assistive technology (AT), augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) and apps and software that can be used in the classroom.

Creating Alternative (Alt) Text

Adding alt text to your images means that your images can be described for people who use assistive technology such as a screen reader, or for people who are accessing the internet on a slow connection so the image cannot be downloaded. Alt text should be added to any image that has meaning to help convey that meaning. Alt text does not need to be added to images that are there for decoration, but they should be marked as decorative.

To add alt text in Microsoft Word or PowerPoint, right click on the image and select “View Alt Text”. It will automatically generate some alt text, which you can then edit.

You could write the text manually, but there are tools available which use AI (artificial intelligence) to help describe the image. AHREFS has a free alt text generator. AltText.Ai is more accurate and is a low price option if you have just a few images to describe. They have a free trial available.

If you have an image or graphic that contains text, you can use Image to Text to “read” the text.

Colour and Contrast

These resources focus on colour and contrast accessibility.

Tools for Checking Colour Contrast

It is important that your text stands out against the background you are using. There are a few tools available to check the contrast of your foreground text and background colour. To use these, you’ll need to find the HEX code for each colour, this is a 6 digit code made up of letters and numbers beginning with a hash symbol, eg #934a8f. The Hex code may be found in your organisation style guide if you are using your brand colours.

Vision Australia recommends TPGi’s colour contrast analyser, which can be downloaded to your computer. Alternatively there are in-browser colour contrast analysers such as WebAIM’s Contrast Checker, which also comes with a colour picker tool. Adobe’s Colour Contrast Analyser allows you to import colours and even gives colour suggestions if your original colour choice fails the accessibility test.

You can also check multiple colours or a colour palette using Adobe’s colour blind safe tool.

To check the contrast of a web page, you can put the web address (URL) into the A11y Colour Contrast Accessibility Validator.