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Re: best ways to do accessibility trainings virtually

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From: Steve Green
Date: Oct 27, 2022 10:23AM

This varies greatly depending on the culture of the company. I view continuous personal development as absolutely essential, so I used to give new testers 15 days off in their first year to do a variety of courses. In their second year I used to put them on a 3-day classroom-based course. After that, they typically did a few one-day courses and 4 to 6 days of conferences each year. We would also do lots of shorter in-house training sessions, from perhaps 30 minutes to a full day.

Now that we provide training courses, we find that some companies are willing to do the same - one put 10 people on a 4-day classroom-based course. However, others don't want to spend more than 1 to 2 hours, so I have often had to rip the guts out of a 1-day course to deliver what I can in a quarter of the time. Inevitably, this tends to leave little or no time for exercises that would help embed the knowledge. These companies never want to do the full course content in chunks, and I assume they just want to be able to say they have provided training and don't care how effective or comprehensive it is.

To answer your question, I would offer both the full day of training and the short videos, then monitor the demand and effectiveness of each. If you can show that people still need a lot of support despite having viewed the videos, you would then have a case for making the full day mandatory (assuming the quality of the video-based training is as good as it can be).

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd


-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Nathan Clark
Sent: 27 October 2022 16:19
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: [WebAIM] best ways to do accessibility trainings virtually

Dear list,


Sorry for the long post.

My company has two products Jira and Confluence. We have an accessibility plug in named unstoppable that makes both Jira and Confluence accessible for blind screen reader users. Our CEO at the beginning of the year wanted us to do half/full day trainings on both unstoppable for Jira and Confluence. However after doing this experiment for every month since may we have had 0 people attend our last 3 monthly sessions. Some of us within the company originally suggested at the beginning of the year that instead of doing the all day trainings that we either create short couple minute videos of our unstoppable product in action with Jira and Confluence and post it to our website and social media sites so people can view it instead of sitting in these half/full day trainings. Our CEO told us that we had to do the full day trainings and it did not turn out well for us in terms of the attendance. Our CEO said that the accessibility community loves full day trainings!!! Is this true?

I was wondering if people could tell me what they think is more beneficial for companies to do full day trainings or create short videos with quizzes to help teach people how to use our products?

Any advice would be great?

Sincerely,
Nathan Clark


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Nathan Clark
QA Automation Analyst Tech team
Accessibility assistant
CPACC
cell: 410-446-7259
email: <EMAIL REMOVED>
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