Making Online Courses Accessible: A Practical WCAG Checklist

Accessibility gets treated as a specialist concern that arrives at the end of a project, usually as an audit nobody budgeted for. In practice most of it is a handful of habits that cost nothing if you adopt them while writing and are expensive to retrofit afterwards.

What standard should I be working to?

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, at level AA. WCAG is organised into levels A, AA and AAA, and AA is the level most public-sector procurement, most large-organisation policy and most legislation around the world points at. AAA includes requirements that are not achievable for all content and is not intended as a blanket target.

In Australia, the Disability Discrimination Act does not name WCAG directly, but government digital standards and most enterprise procurement do. If you are selling training to government or large organisations, expect AA to appear in the requirements.

What are the things that matter most in a course?

Six, in rough order of how often they are the problem:

• Text alternatives for images. Every image that carries meaning needs alt text describing what it conveys. Decorative images need empty alt text so screen readers skip them rather than announcing a filename.
• Captions for video, transcripts for audio. Captions are not optional at AA, and auto-generated captions need correcting — an uncorrected transcript of technical content is frequently wrong in exactly the places that matter.
• Colour contrast. Body text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 against its background; large text needs 3:1. This is the single most common failure in branded courses, because brand palettes are chosen for logos rather than body text.
• Keyboard operability. Everything a learner can do with a mouse must be doable with a keyboard, in a sensible order, with a visible focus indicator. Interactive blocks are where this usually breaks.
• Real structure. Headings marked as headings, lists as lists. Screen reader users navigate by heading, so a course whose headings are just large text is close to unnavigable.
• Colour is not the only signal. If correct answers are green and wrong ones red with no other difference, that information does not exist for a substantial number of learners.

What does this mean for the way I write?

Three habits carry most of it. Write link text that makes sense out of context, because screen reader users often navigate by pulling up a list of links — "click here" tells them nothing. Do not rely on spatial references like "the box on the right", which assume a visual layout that may not exist. And write alt text as a sentence about meaning rather than a description of pixels: "the approvals screen with the Submit button disabled" beats "screenshot".

Where do course builders usually fall down?

Branding and interactivity, in that order.

Branding fails because organisational colours are chosen for print and logos, and a mid-tone brand colour used for body text on white commonly lands somewhere around 3:1 — legible to most people, and genuinely difficult for others. Check the actual ratio rather than trusting your eyes; there are free contrast checkers and it takes seconds.

Interactivity fails because drag-and-drop, hotspots and anything requiring precise pointing are hard to make keyboard-operable and harder to make screen-reader-comprehensible. That does not mean avoiding them. It means having an accessible equivalent for the same learning, and being honest that a decorative interaction which cannot be made accessible should be cut rather than shipped with an apology.

Does SCORM affect accessibility?

Not directly — SCORM is a packaging and tracking format, and it has no opinion about the content inside. But the LMS wrapper around your course has its own accessibility characteristics, and a perfectly accessible course inside an inaccessible player is not accessible to the learner. Worth testing in the platform people will actually use rather than only in preview.

How do I test it without specialist tools?

Four checks that take about twenty minutes and find most problems:

• Unplug your mouse and complete the course. Anything you cannot reach or cannot see focused is a defect.
• Zoom the browser to 200%. Text should reflow rather than being cut off or requiring horizontal scrolling.
• Run a contrast checker over your theme colours once. Fixing the theme fixes every course that uses it.
• Turn on your operating system's built-in screen reader and listen to one module. It is uncomfortable and it is the fastest way to find alt text that says nothing.

The thing worth internalising

Almost everything on this list also makes the course better for people without a disability. Captions get used on trains. Good heading structure helps everyone scan. High contrast helps in bright light. Accessibility work is rarely a trade-off against quality; it is usually just quality, arriving under a different name.