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Digital Accessibility Courses Roundup

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I always look forward to expand my knowledge in the Digital Accessibility space & as part of this I am on lookout for courses both free & paid that can add value to my resume & career. Here is a list of accessibility courses offered by various organizations. I have personally taken few of these courses & gained some valuable insights & I hope that these courses might come in handy for you to advance your career.

Free Accessibility Courses

  • Introduction to Web Accessibility
    Get a strong foundation in digital accessibility to make your websites and apps work well for people with disabilities, meet international standards, and provide a better user experience for everyone.
  • An Introduction to Accessibility and Inclusive Design
    This course introduces some of the fundamental principles of accessibility and prepares learners for further study in accessibility and inclusive design. Learners will have an opportunity to explore the major types of disabilities and related assistive technology and adaptive strategies, the most salient contours of the legal landscape, and the major principles that guide universal design and accessible content creation.
  • The Accessibility MOOC: Inclusive Online Course Design
    Delivering accessible online courses and content is a big part of inclusivity. Traditionally, the conversation around accessibility in online courses has often stopped at the learning management system (LMS) itself, without offering a solution for addressing issues with the course content.
  • Digital Accessibility as a Business Practice
    Many business leaders and managers understand why digital accessibility is important for business. There are many arguments that make clear the benefits of digital accessibility, and how it affects a business’s bottom line. Despite this understanding, some leaders are unsure where to start, and need help with the what and how of implementing digital accessibility throughout their organizations.

    Digital Accessibility as a Business Practice is a free three-week Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) developed by the Digital Education Strategies team at Ryerson University’s G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education, in partnership with the Government of Ontario’s Enabling Change Program. This course provides business leaders with the tools and knowledge needed to effectively enable digital accessibility in an organization through cultural change, raising awareness of its importance, and equipping employees with the specific tools and knowledge they need to address digital accessibility as part of their everyday work.

  • Digital Accessibility: Enabling Participation in the Information Society
    With a better understanding of users’ needs, technologies can be developed to be accessible & provide a more inclusive environment.
  • Google’s Accessibility course
    In this course you’ll get hands-on experience making web applications accessible. You’ll understand when and why users need accessibility. Then you’ll dive into the “how”: making a page work properly with screen readers, and managing input focus (e.g. the highlight you see when tabbing through a form.) You’ll understand what “semantics” and “semantic markup” mean for web pages and add ARIA markup to enable navigating the interface with a range of assistive devices. Finally, you’ll learn styling techniques that help users with partial vision navigate your pages easily and reliably.
  • Training teachers to author accessible content by Microsoft
    Everyone should have access to all educational materials in your classroom. This course will provide information on

    • the importance of creating accessible documents
    • creating new and revising old Word, OneNote and PowerPoint documents so they are accessible to everyone
    • Skype Translator and Office Lens as key tools for creating accessible content for all learners
  • Professional Web Accessibility Auditing Made Easy
    There is increasing demand within many businesses for Web accessibility auditing expertise, but there is a shortage of necessary knowledge and skills.

    Professional Web Accessibility Auditing Made Easy – a new online course developed by Ryerson University’s G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education, in partnership with the Government of Ontario’s EnAbling Change Program – will help web content editors and web developers to quickly build the knowledge, skills, and practical experience needed to effectively support an organization’s web accessibility compliance efforts.

  • Web Accessibility for Developers
    With the introduction of WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative – Accessible Rich Internet Applications) Specification, developers can be much more creative when developing interactive elements for the Web than was possible before its advent. When WAI-ARIA is used with accessible Javascript, the sky’s the limit when it comes to potential interactions on the web, interactions that are also possible for those using assistive technology.

    This course is intended for Web Developers who want to develop skill using WAI-ARIA to create accessible interactive applications for the Web.

  • Introduction to Web Accessibility
    With raised awareness and accessibility laws emerging around the world, understanding what inclusive access to the Web means is becoming necessary knowledge for anyone who produces digital content. Much of the current information on Web accessibility requires some technical understanding, and may be difficult to consume for the average person. This course will “interpret” the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0), to make it easier to understand for a general audience. You will have an opportunity to experience barriers firsthand, then experience that content with the barriers removed, developing a practical understanding of web accessibility.
  • Understanding Document Accessibility
    With much of the world gone digital, learning to create documents that are accessible to everyone is becoming a necessary skill. Intended for a general audience, this free course will review a wide range of document authoring applications, and the tools they contain for creating accessible documents, and testing them to ensure they do not contain potential barriers. Learn how to create accessible word processed documents, spreadsheets, presentation slides, and PDF documents, among others, so they are accessible to everyone.
  • Start Building Accessible Web Applications Today by Marcy Sutton
    Accessibility (or a11y) is an important but often neglected in the world of web development. Many developers find themselves coding user interfaces without any knowledge of keyboard or screen reader requirements.

    The fact is that accessibility doesn’t happen by accident. Often it is seen as too hard or time consuming. This doesn’t have to be the case. By following a handful of high-value patterns and practices, we can open our web apps to humans that otherwise wouldn’t be able to interact with them at all.

    This course will introduce you to accessibility through hands-on, technical examples that are way more effective than reading 10-year-old static web content.

  • Teach Access
    Welcome to the Teach Access Tutorial! This resource is part of the Teach Access Initiative, and provides best practices for making accessible mobile and web apps. This tutorial currently provides basic training for developers and designers, with more disciplines to come! If you are new to accessibility, you’ve come to the right place – the following material will help you get a solid footing on accessibility via hands-on exercises and useful reference guides.
  • Introduction to Course Accessibility
    This resource provides an introduction to online course accessibility for faculty, staff, and instructional designers. The content is self-paced and will not have an instructor facilitating the learning and use of the resource. Within this resource, reasons for building and maintaining accessible courses are contextualized, explained and demonstrated. Emphasis is given to the use and evaluation of features within a Learning Management System (LMS) as a platform for both content delivery and student engagement. Participants in this course also learn to create downloadable files using templates that are pre-formatted for accessibility. These include both Microsoft PowerPoint and Word files that can be used to disseminate accessible course content such as lectures, slides, syllabi, and readings.
  • Assistive technologies and online learning
    In this free course, Assistive technologies and online learning, you will explore some of the technology that disabled students use when accessing computers. We will take a look at the tools and techniques that make it possible for disabled students to engage with online learning.
  • Basics of Inclusive Design for Online Education
    This course provides instruction and strategies to support you in developing a course that is inclusive to students with a wide range of abilities, including students with disabilities. We cover effective practices to increase inclusion and avoid some of the common accessibility issues that can arise in an online course.

    In particular, Basics of Inclusive Design Online covers course organization, the accessibility of Microsoft Office and PDF documents, making course instruction pages accessible, captioning of videos, making images accessible, and designing for learning differences. We also discuss how inclusive course materials can help all students, including students without disabilities.

    This course will appeal to those who want both a broad overview of the range of accessibility considerations and also a step-by-step guide of how to check documents for accessibility, caption a video, or prepare course content for non-visual users.

  • Accessible Word Document Training
    Welcome to the State of Minnesota’s free e-Learning program on how to create accessible documents. While it focuses on Microsoft Word, you can apply its principles to any digital document creation tool, such as Google Docs.

Paid Accessibility Courses

Accessibility Courses Offered by Universities

Most of the content is curated from the Mike Gifford’s GitHub Accessibility Courses page

About Raghavendra Satish Peri

Raghava is a digital accessibility evangelist working at Deque Systems as Senior Accessibility Consultant breaking web accessibility & mobile accessibility challenges.

He authors an Accessibility Blog & is galvanising the adoption of accessibility by inspiring the local tech community with meetups and mentorship. When away from his computer, Raghava can be found at local cafes & restaurants sampling cuisines, attending local meetups, listening to audio books or writing on his Personal Blog.

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