Creating Accessible Articulate Courses

Although creating accessible Articulate courses can be a complex issue, the following guidance is aimed at providing a brief and helpful overview. Articulate courses can have significant accessibility issues especially with regards to keyboard navigation and compatibility with screen readers. . The guidance below is aimed at helping you make your courses as accessible as possible within these constraints.

Accessibility Statements

If you are adding additional features in addition to the most-accessible features noted below, then you will need to manually test your course for accessibility and create an accessibility statement. The accessibility statement needs to account for the content you have added to the course as well as Articulate itself.  An Accessibility Statement is a requirement of the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No.2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

For more information about the regulations, please see:

 The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

The definition of ‘accessible’ is based on that set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is the:

 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.2 AA

We have created a checklist for creating Articulate courses that are as accessible as possible. If you follow these guidelines, then your course should be covered by the general accessibility statement for Articulate, and not require further testing. However, if you deviate from these guidelines or add content that introduces additional accessibility errors then you will need to manually test your course against the WCAG 2.2 AA guidelines and write your own accessibility statement. If you have any questions or concerns about this, please contact Viki Galt, whose details are at the bottom of this page.

We have also included some general articulate accessibility considerations listed below.

General Articulate Accessibility Considerations

• Ensure layout options do not place text over an image. Ensure you choose a layout where the text is placed on a solid background.

   

• Do not use the option to upload an image with text over it.

   

• Ensure you use sufficent colour contrast. You can use a free contrast checker such as WebAIM Contrast Checker. It can also be helpful to choose a pale off-white background colour so that the background is not stark white, such as a very light yellow or very light blue.

   

• It is possible to choose different font combinations under the ‘font’ option. Ensure that you choose a sans serif font for both the headings and the body text. Ensure the minimum font size you use is 12pt.

   Find out more about Sans Serif fonts here

   

• Under ‘blocks’ block animations to stop text or images moving into the screen as the user scrolls.

   

• Avoid using the functions such as ‘Labelled Graphic’, Sorting Activity’, ‘Flashcards’, and ‘Process’. These can be inaccessible because of lack of compatibility with assistive software, or becuase they introduce unnecessary movement into the site.

   

• Ensure any videos upload have human-corrected captions, a human-corrected transcript (and an audio description if required).

   

• Avoid the use of continuous capitals or italics or underline (other than for links); use bold to emphasise text instead

   

• Use heading levels throughout your page to ensure that screen readers can recognise headings on the page.

   

• Ensure that all non-text items have meaningful alternative text descriptions e.g. graphs, charts or images all need meaningful alt-text, that can be understood by assistive technology.

   

• Make sure you don’t convey any information by  colour only, for example, colour coding in a pie chart or bar graph could be inaccessible to some users.

   

• Write all of your content in a simple and easy to understand way, making sure to write out abbreviations in full the first time.

   

• Avoid using naked URLs, or ambiguous links such as ‘click here’: all links should have clear text that states where the link goes.

   

• Additionally, try to have links that open in the same tab – if they are going to open a pop up or in a new tab, you should notify the user of this.

Questions?

If you have any further queries please contact Viki Galt, Head of Disability Information, contact details below.

Request an Alternative Format

If you require this document in an alternative format please contact Viki Galt, Head of Disability Information at the contact details below.