Standards to Make Your LMS Accessible

Why Accessibility Matters

Your current customers and potential new customers need learning management systems (LMS) that:

are accessible to instructors and other LMS users with disabilities
produce accessible content for students

Accessibility for instructors and students is an essential aspect of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Accessibility is required by law and is a procurement requirement in many situations.

Example Scenarios

These persona scenarios show examples of accessibility problems that disabled people experience using LMSs, and what works well in tools that are accessible.

Everyone can use previews

Persona: Zola is a physics professor at a large university. She is blind and uses a screen reader that reads aloud the information on her screen.

Problem: I can't preview uploaded content for my students using my screen reader. I can't navigate the preview like I can a regular web page.
Works well: The content preview works just like a web page in a browser. I can navigate it easily using my screen reader's functionality.

Users who have auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech, or visual disabilities need to be able to preview the course content before posting it for students.

Everyone can edit content

Persona: Aroon is a school administrator. He can't move his arms due to a spinal cord injury and he uses speech recognition to navigate through applications and websites.

Problem: I can't sort the course attendees data table. There's no way to activate the column sort with voice.
Works well: I can interact with the course attendees table by voice. I can select the column I want to sort by.

Some people cannot use a mouse. They need to be able to use your LMS with their tools, such as speech recognition, keyboard, and switches.

The LMS helps make course content accessible

Persona: Irina is the director of an online professional training center. She is an expert in her job; however, she doesn't know much about accessibility.

Problem: I'm adding charts to our courses. I have no idea what I need to do to make them accessible to students with disabilities.
Works well: Whenever I add a chart to a course, the tool prompts me to add a short description and a full text alternative for the chart data. There's also "Learn More" that explains why it's important for accessibility, and how to do it well.

LMSs need to produce accessible content. Part of that is up to your tool and part is up to the user. Your tool can provide prompts and information to help users know what they need to do to provide accessible course content.

The Accessibility Standard to Help You

Your learning management system (LMS) is sometimes called an “authoring tool” because people use it to author or create course content. There is an international standard that addresses accessibility needs in LMSs: Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG).

Use ATAG to help make your tool:

accessible to instructors and other users with disabilities (Part A)
support accessible content for students (Part B)

Examples

ATAG covers the example scenarios above:

Everyone can use previews — ATAG says: Ensure that previews are accessible. Course authors often periodically check how browsers will display the content to students. Authors with disabilities need the same opportunity to check their work.
Everyone can edit content — ATAG says: Provide keyboard access to authoring features. Some authors with limited mobility or visual disabilities do not use a mouse. Instead, they require keyboard interface access to all of the functionality of the authoring tool.
The LMS helps make course content accessible — ATAG says: Guide authors to produce accessible content. Assist authors with managing alternative content for non-text content. Ensure that documentation promotes the production of accessible content.

And ATAG covers much more.

To get started putting ATAG to work for you, see:

Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) Overview, with links to the ATAG standard and Implementing ATAG
ATAG at a Glance, a paraphrased summary to give you an idea of what’s covered in ATAG