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Re: best ways to do accessibility trainings virtually

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From: Dudas, Carolyn
Date: Oct 27, 2022 1:18PM

Based upon my training experience, sessions generally should not be longer than 1 hour --- whether online or in-person. Attention spans are too short. And anything longer than that tends to result in information overload and people zone out.

So you might want to consider breaking down the all day sessions into shorter time segments and maybe offer them over several weeks. It would also be helpful if the sessions were recorded (and, of course, made accessible).

It's also helpful if the sessions are interactive --- allow enough time for questions and maybe a 1-question quiz periodically to see if they understood the topic.

Short videos (5 - 15 minutes) are effective as well. However, they are a lot of work to produce if you want them to come off smoothly --- especially if you are a 1-person team (like me) that has to write the script, record the video, edit the video, created associated training materials, etc.

Whether doing an online, in-person, or a recording, always provide a quick overview of the topic (don't dig deep --- you won't have time for that) and then demonstrate the task. You want your audience to feel comfortable that they can do the task on their own after attending the session or watching the recording. (If you need to dig deeper into a topic, that should be a separate session/video.) If you have supportive materials, be sure to provide those (handouts, links to resources, who to contact for help, etc.).

One thing I found helpful in terms of captioning was to upload my videos to Office 365 Stream and let it automatically create the transcript and captions. It's extremely accurate and easy to correct any errors. Then make your videos available to your audience in Stream. (Be aware that if you download the video from Stream to use elsewhere, you will lose the captions.)

Hope this helps.

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Message: 3
Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2022 11:18:46 -0400
From: Nathan Clark < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: [WebAIM] best ways to do accessibility trainings virtually
Message-ID:
< <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

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


--
Nathan Clark
QA Automation Analyst Tech team
Accessibility assistant
CPACC
cell: 410-446-7259
email: <EMAIL REMOVED>
101 Village Blvd
Princeton, NJ 08540
SMBE & Minority Owned Business