Accessible L&D in the Age of AI
Happy Wednesday!
Accessibility has benefitted by recent technological advancements around speech recognition and AI. More personalized learning is a huge boon to folks with learning disabilities for a number of reasons. And one of the few nice things coming out of the pandemic is that companies finally stopped pretending that they can’t give reasonable accommodations for workers who for one reason or another had to be remote. These recent changes in both laws and technologies means that the need for us to advocate for accessibility as learning professionals has grown.
I’m watching higher ed somewhat just to see what learners are starting to expect and do before they join the workforce. Unfortunately there’s still a lot of fear and uncertainty from educators in adopting AI. That means that certain AI advances in note taking have uneven adoption. Some people entering the workforce may feel there is a stigma or that somehow it’s a less honest way to learn. As a learning professional and someone who’s dyslexic I acknowledge that writing notes in the moment is almost always superior for learning but it’s out of reach for many of us.
Driving Disability Inclusion: Action Steps for Organizational Success
Now more than ever it’s important to co-create accessible learning experiences with our audiences. Now that much more of content creation is becoming faster and faster we should use some of that time to embed ourselves with our audiences to fully understand their needs especially as technology, accommodations and challenges are rapidly evolving and not the same as they were even a couple years ago.
Check out this fast and free accessibility analysis tool. Sometimes developer tools leave you scratching your head as to what actually needs to change to improve accessibility. This one gives you a list of critical and not critical things in a friendly format.
Affiliate Link: Mismatch
Mismatch is one of my favorite books. It’s a philosophy that a mismatch between someone's needs and a product causes exclusion. The book itself provides practices and processes, which are very relevant to L&D, which will help you build processes, systems and products (like elearning, video etc…) which is more inclusive. It is critical in L&D to reach *everyone and this book will help you get a little closer to that goal.
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