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Picture your first day at a new job. You're new. You don't know anyone. You don't know much about the company or what they really do. Someone hands you a badge, walks you to a training room, and tells you training starts in ten minutes. The next eight hours are a blur of names you won't remember, systems you've never seen, and the constant low-level pressure of trying to appear competent while absorbing an overwhelming amount of new information. That's a normal first day. We'

April is Autism Awareness Month. And while awareness is a starting point, what the neurodivergent community - and the broader workforce - actually needs is something more practical. Not just awareness. Action. So this post is my contribution to that. I've spent a lot of this series talking about accessibility from the outside looking in. Standards I learned through compliance requirements. Gaps I noticed in other people's work. Design problems I was trained to identify and fi

There have been moments in my career - sitting in a training session, staring at a slide packed wall to wall with text, listening to a narrator or lecturer read every single word verbatim - where my brain just... left. Not because I wasn't trying. Not because I didn't care about the content. Because the design made it impossible to stay. I know what it feels like to be a learner that a course wasn't built for. That experience shapes how I think about cognitive accessibility m

As designers, let's be honest, motor or physical disabilities rarely lead the conversation when we discuss WCAG or 508. As we've discussed previously, vision gets the spotlight, hearing gets a nod, and we sometimes forget to think about motor accessibility early in design, if at all. That's a problem, and the numbers tell a story worth paying attention to. According to the CDC, approximately 13.7% of U.S. adults have some form of motor disability. This includes people who

When most people think about accessibility in eLearning, vision tends to dominate the conversation. Screen readers, alt text, color contrast. And while all of that matters (we covered it in the last post ), auditory accessibility often gets treated as an afterthought - a quick closed caption drop at the end of the build, if it happens at all. That's a problem. And the numbers make it hard to ignore. According to the CDC, approximately 12% of all U.S. workers have some degree

Let me tell you a story about why storytelling matters in learning and development. It starts with a boy who never quite fit in. He struggled with the things that seemed to come naturally to everyone else: manners, social cues, how to express himself, how to just... be. At school it wasn't much better. He couldn't tie his shoes. He couldn't add 2+2. He sat in classrooms full of kids who seemed to understand a world that felt completely foreign to him. "What a stupid, stupid b

When most people hear "accessible eLearning," visual accessibility is usually the first thing that comes to mind. Screen readers. Alt text. Maybe a vague memory of someone mentioning color contrast at a conference once. It's the most visible category (no pun intended) and also the one most designers think they've handled. Add some alt text, maybe check a contrast ratio, and move on. Box checked. Except it's not that simple. Visual accessibility isn't one thing. It's a set of

One of the questions I get asked most about from someone learning design is some version of: "Walk me through your design process." It's a fair question. And the honest answer is that I don't follow one framework rigidly. I use a hybrid - ADDIE as the backbone, SAM's iterative thinking layered on top - and I've shaped it into something agile enough to work on a two-week microlearning build or even for a longer program like onboarding. Here's how I do it: It Starts With Needs

Let me be upfront about something. I did not arrive in accessibility with a passion project and a manifesto. I arrived because a federal contract told me I had no choice. Section 508 compliance on government work is not optional. So, I had to learn. Fast. And somewhat reluctantly. Years later, with a better understanding of it both professionally and personally, I'm writing a blog series about it. Life is funny that way. If you're newer to this than I was, or if you've been n

I didn't get into accessibility because I was passionate about it. I got into it because a federal contract required it and I had no choice. Section 508 compliance isn't a suggestion in government work. You meet the standard or you don't. So I learned fast. And once I did, I couldn't design a course the same way again. Most workplace training is built for a person who doesn't really exist. Perfect vision. Full hearing. No attention challenges. No processing differences. Just

Every L&D pro starts a project the same way: "We want to build something really good for our learners." And they mean it. Until the design process actually begins.

One of the things that still surprises me in learning design is how often organizations rely on long, drawn-out training sessions for topics that simply don’t require that level of time or detail.