In the seminar I teach, faculty and staff not only learn about structuring their online courses, but also learn about structuring their course documents to facilitate the use of a screen reader. They are given an unformatted document along with an interactive tutorial I developed. As participants work through the tutorial, they are formatting the document.
Faculty learn that in order to develop an accessible Microsoft Word document they should use headings to organize it, not various font sizes. Headings are found in the styles gallery. Heading 1 (H1) would be used for the title, and H2 would be used for subheadings to H1. Subheadings to H2 would be H3 (Coombs, 2010). This is a repeating pattern as deeper sub levels of headings are used.
Tags: accessible elearning • eLearning challenges • Instructional Design • Instructional Design Tips • Section 508 Compliant eLearning