Internal Mobility
1. Visual impairments:
Low vision, colour-blindness or total blindness. Rely on screen readers, high-contrast text and audio descriptions.
Imagine a workplace where every employee – regardless of sight, hearing, mobility or cognitive style – can access your digital training with ease.
Yet today, it’s estimated that 16% of the global population (≈1.3 billion people) live with significant disabilities, and approximately 1 in 4 US adults and 1 in 8 UK students report a disability.
Inaccessible learning leaves critical talent behind, frustrates learners, and expose your organisation to fines under the UK Equality Act, US Section 508 and the EU Web Accessibility Directive.
Inclusive design not only meets these legal requirements but also drives measurable benefits, such as:
In this article, you’ll learn how to:
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the globally accepted standards that tell us how to create digital content – websites, courses and apps – that people with disabilities can perceive, operate, understand and interact with efficiently.
They organise success criteria into three levels – A, AA and AAA – with each level representing a progressively higher degree of inclusivity and user experience.
POUR is the core accessibility guidance defined in the W3C’s WCAG standards – an expert-backed set of recommendations rather than legal rules – designed to help content creators ensure courses are Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Robust for all learners.
It breaks down the WCAG principles into four actionable goals, ensuring that every learner can effectively engage with your content:
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a research-backed educational framework developed by CAST.
Unlike WCAG/POUR, which focus on making digital content technically accessible, UDL guides how you structure and teach content so all learners, regardless of background or ability, can engage, understand and demonstrate learning in ways that suit them.
UDL emphasises three guiding principles:
While POUR ensures your platform and content are technically accessible, UDL ensures how you teach and assess is inclusive.
Together, they create digital learning experiences that are both accessible and effective for a truly diverse audience.
Digital learning must comply with mandatory accessibility laws:
Risks of non-compliance: Fines, legal fees (e.g. multi-million-dollar settlements in the US), negative publicity and stalled L&D budgets.
Mapping your checklist to WCAG AA and your organisation’s D&I policies ensures you cover technical and organisational obligations.
Before you can remove obstacles, you need to understand the main barriers that different learners face, so you can tailor your courses to meet their specific needs:
Low vision, colour-blindness or total blindness. Rely on screen readers, high-contrast text and audio descriptions.
Deaf or hard-of-hearing learners need captions, transcripts and visual cues in place of audio-only signals.
Dyslexia, ADHD, autism or memory challenges. Benefit from short chunks of content, clear headings and the ability to pause or replay media.
Limited dexterity or older devices require keyboard-friendly controls and minimal dependence on drag-and-drop.
Follow these straightforward actions in every project:
There is a number of useful tools and methods that you can use in order to test whether your material meets accessibility guidelines:
Embedding accessibility into your workflow ensures that every project benefits from consistent, baked-in inclusive practices rather than last-minute fixes.
By formalising roles, milestones and culture-building activities, you turn accessibility from a one-off checklist into a core part of how your L&D team delivers value – reducing risk, saving time and championing inclusion at every step.
Here’s how you can do that:
To secure continued investment and prove the real-world value of inclusive learning, you need clear, easy-to-track metrics that connect engagement, learner satisfaction and business outcomes.
Below are the simplest data points to collect, how to interpret them, and the best format to present your results to stakeholders:
If reading this article has highlighted changes that your organisation needs to make to ensure your workplace learning is more accessible, don’t worry – we can help.
Get in touch with us today to find out more about how our digital design experts, whose clients include some of the biggest companies in the world – such as Amazon and Lego – can support you.
Written by Matt Fawthrop
