Transcript: Making Online Learning Accessible

Intro

Hi friends, this month’s episode is a short one. I have been so busy with the final updates on my book, moving our academy to a brand new platform, and somehow also building an app! We have been getting some amazing suggestions for guests on the show, and we’ll be back to our regular interview format next month. I can’t wait to share all about accessible travel, fitness, and so many more surprises on the way. For this month, however, please enjoy a short introduction to yours truly, your podcast hostess. Thanks for sticking with us.

Making Online Learning Accessible

Welcome back to Making Blank Accessible. Today we are turning the mic around to talk about a space that has become the classroom for millions, the digital world. We are Making Online Learning accessible. I’m your host, Britne Jenke, and in addition to hosting this show, I am the founder of Inclusive Pixelation, an accessibility consulting agency dedicated to helping organizations bridge the gap between intent and inclusion.

I’ve been living and breathing this work for over 20 years across the entire spectrum of adult learning, from libraries and small nonprofits to large scale corporate training departments and complex instructional design projects. We’re doing this special feature episode this month to celebrate the upcoming release of the second edition of my book, Making Online Learning Accessible. It’s been updated and expanded throughout with new resources and refreshed checklists to guide your work.

Find it on Amazon now. You can pre-order. Releasing on January 29th.

A11y and Approachable Accessibility

Before we dive into the how-to of making online learning accessible, I want to touch on the name of the solutions that we offer here at Inclusive Pixelation. That A-1-1-Y or A-11-Y is a numeronym similar to Y2K. There are 11 letters between the A and the Y in the word accessibility. We use this abbreviation or numeronym because frankly, accessibility is a long word to type and to say. It can be pronounced either ally or accessibility, whichever you prefer. And it’s just our way of keeping things simple, which leads into my core philosophy of approachable accessibility.

I know that accessibility can feel overwhelming. People see those WCAG guidelines and their eyes just glaze over. In the book, I’ve taken all of those dense technical requirements and translated them into plain English. My goal isn’t just to help you be compliant, it’s to make accessibility easy to integrate into your existing workflow. That’s why every chapter now includes both a full checklist and an easy reference checklist. So you can stop worrying about the jargon and start making an impact today.

Lived and Practical Experience

That need for simplicity and adaptability is something that I live every day. My perspective on accessibility isn’t just professional, it’s personal. My husband and I live and travel in an RV going across the country for consulting projects and conference appearances. We share a mobile home with our furry family, including my emotional support cat Brandy and my husband’s three small dogs, two of which are retired service dogs. Living and working on the road while managing my own disabilities gives me a unique view of how access changes depending on your zip code. And it drives my passion for making sure all spaces are accessible to people with disabilities and neurodivergence.

Because I live this work, I value practical hands-on experience over formal education every single day. You’ll notice I have a lot of letters after my name for certifications, CPACC, CPTD, SPHR, but some letters that you’ll probably never see there are ones like MBA or PhD. In fact, most instructional design and adult learning programs don’t even mention accessibility in their core curriculum. This philosophy extends to how we do our hiring at Inclusive Pixelation as well. We hire APTDs and CPTDs for our trainers. We don’t require degrees, and we place the highest value on lived experience.

That lived experience includes navigating the world with invisible disabilities. If you’ve ever seen me training or presenting in person, you’ve probably noticed I’m almost always wearing yellow. That’s a deliberate nod to the hidden disability sunflower. For those who aren’t familiar, the sunflower symbol was created to help people with invisible disabilities, like my own PTSD, bipolar disorder, and sleep disorders, discreetly signal that they may need a little bit more support or some patience. I wear it to normalize the conversation around the disabilities that you can’t see.

I believe that teaching accessibility as a person with disabilities provides a crucial perspective that other educators simply can’t match. While many can teach you the what and the how based on the guidelines and manuals, my lived experience allows me to teach the why from a place of daily reality, bridging the gap between theoretical compliance and true human inclusion.

This journey hasn’t been easy. Living and working while disabled means I can’t be terminally online like creators with 10,000 followers. I’d much rather be known for sharing quality, actionable educational resources than my social media metrics. I’m sorry if that’s important to you!

It can be a cruel world when you’re self-employed and you do your own marketing, but I chose this path after years of being discriminated against in the workplace for my own disabilities. Now I’m on a mission of Making Work Accessible to anyone with disabilities or neurodivergence so they don’t have to face the same barriers that I did.

Curb Cuts, Equity, and AI

Part of that mission involves understanding the curb cut effect, how designing for disability ends up benefiting everyone. When we build accessible online learning, we are helping the person on a noisy train or the exhausted worker. But I want to be clear, the primary goal of accessibility is designing for people with disabilities. The fact that it helps everyone else is a powerful side effect, but our focus must remain on inclusion for those who are most often excluded.

This is especially vital today. With the recent turmoil surrounding DEI initiatives, we can’t afford to ignore our disabled and neurodivergent learners. Accessibility is equity. In a world that is questioning the value of inclusion, we are doubling down. You can’t have an equitable workplace if your learning materials are gated behind inaccessible design.

As we look to the future, we also have AI. It’s a double-edged sword. It can help us generate captions and alt text in seconds. But if used poorly, it can hinder us by hallucinating or creating content that is technically functional, but fundamentally unusable. We have to keep the human in the loop.

Call to Action

So where do we start? When you’re creating a brand new course, don’t reach for your authoring tool first. Start with the discovery phase. Define your learning outcomes and ensure there is more than one path to reach them. If you design with multiple means of representation and engagement from day one, you won’t have to fix it later.

Finally, for all of the content creators listening today, your first task is plain language. If your instructions aren’t clear, your content isn’t accessible. Approachable design starts with approachable language. Get rid of some of that jargon and those acronyms and clean up your language so that all of your learners can understand.

At Inclusive Pixelation, we provide the full ecosystem for your success, from custom consulting and training to our online courses and our handbooks. You can even find accessibility gear in our shop. And keep an eye out for our upcoming app, coming this year designed to help business owners and HR professionals ensure their physical and digital spaces are truly welcoming.

For now, you can preorder the second edition of Making Online Learning Accessible on Amazon today. Links will be in the description.

A huge thank you to all of you for allowing me a few moments to share my expertise. If this episode helped you see the sunflower in your own work, please hit follow or subscribe in your podcast app. Following the show ensures you never miss an episode where we fill in the blank. As always, a time stamped transcript of today’s episode, along with links to all of my resources, can be found on our website.

Until next time, this is Making Blank Accessible, the accessibility show. Get out there and build a more inclusive world!