SCORM Accessibility

SCORM courses are self-contained, meaning a user can’t search the knowledge within the course from a search engine. If a user can’t find what they want, the relevancy of any platform decreases, which leads to disengagement. To build frequent engagement, you need to build positive habits by reinforcing relevancy at all times.

Outside of the learning industry, consumer technology works in a simplified format - think of how you use Google and how it can search inside a website. What would happen if when you searched on Google and could only see the website's name and descriptions and not the content on the site? It quickly becomes unusable. How do you get back to that one article that you loved? How do you find the answer to the question you need?

What if I need to continue using SCORM?

Fuse fully supports SCORM 1.2 courses, and when uploading the Knowledge Intelligence Engine will index the title, description and any tags you add. Fuse search makes it much easier to find course content compared to other providers, but we are unable to apply transcripts, subtitles and other accessibility features to the SCORM course itself.

Design

While the design of your course is usually dictated by your brand guidelines and the needs of your audience, there are some subtle changes you can make to ensure your content is accessible to everyone.

If creating your own content, here are some items to consider:

Key considerations:

Use sufficient contrast between colours. Google’s Developer Tools, included in their Chrome browser, provides information about the contrast levels on any web page
Avoid placing text on background images with changing or fading colours
Don’t use red and green alone to differentiate items on a page
Keep related items close to each other

Treat each slide like a webpage

The requirements for accessibility are not dissimilar to the requirements of clear, concise web content. In short, your content should be descriptive, well organised and easy to control and navigate.

Key considerations:

Page titles should be descriptive – and never shared by multiple pages
Sub-headings should be used to divide long passages of text
employees should have options to control sliders and carousels
Instructions should not rely on visual clues

Javascript in SCORM

There are some courses created where the designer will use Javascript to create custom events (such as to set completion after an event happens). Whilst SCORM supports this, we see clients run into lots of issues here. For example, we’ve seen courses where you have to click a small button on the final page that wasn’t labelled correctly or you have to complete a complicated assessment which caused a huge amount of negative feedback into the client’s helpdesk.

Custom Javascript is rarely ever developed with accessibility in mind. If using Javascript, ensure that the instructions and navigation are clear and purposeful.

Using an authoring tool

The following links will help you create accessible content in different authoring tools:

Creating SCORM for mobile

We don’t recommend creating SCORM content for mobile, as it is a poor end-user experience and likely to be more inaccessible. If your employees use the mobile app, we recommend using more micro-learning assets.

However, if you wish to do this, you must ensure the content is responsive (adapts to the screen size and portrait/landscape mode) and that it cannot be output in Flash (only HTML5). Content is automatically set to launch in a new window (see the Mobile section below).

How else can I improve accessibility?

By breaking the SCORM object down into individual content items, Fuse can make the knowledge you’ve spent time curating more discoverable - meaning employees can find the answer that they need at the moment they need it without needing to traverse an entire course.