Style Guide for Accessible Design in the DHS LMS
Designing online content accessibly improves the learning experience for all users. The LMS provides many built-in accessibility features. Using these features will significantly improve your ability to create an accessible online course and will also save you time.
An advantage of the DHS LMS is the versatility and range of tools and features. With that comes a bit of responsibility to the learning community of users and to our fellow writers and developers. Part of providing great content is making sure that the content is easy to access for everyone.
As content creators, we have a responsibility to ensure that all of our work is accessible to everyone and that means being aware of and designing to WCAG 2.0. There isn’t any extra work to do as the guidelines are more about how the information is presented and organized. Existing content may need to be remediated but as you build new content, it is easy to design with WCAG 2.0 in mind.
The idea is that we don’t need to sacrifice content or functionality in our product to be inclusive and provide accessible content. It just comes down to planning and being intentional about how the content is presented. An accessible document is a better document that helps everyone, not just a special document to meet requirements.
Our goal is to be WCAG “AA” compliant on all things while aiming for “AAA”