Our mission at Lumen is to enable unprecedented learning for all students. As part of this mission, we are committed to providing accessible learning materials and strive to build inclusive products for users of all abilities by following the guidelines set out by the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Meaningful alternative text for images, visual content with appropriate color contrast and resolution, and screen reader testing with JAWS and NVDA throughout the development process are only a few of the practices we engage in to bring an accessible and equitable experience to students.
Our Course Content
Our internal review and remediation process proactively identifies and resolves accessibility issues in our course content on a regular basis. As we make accessibility improvements to our materials, we share our work openly.
The permissions of the 5Rs of OER allow us to revise open content, enabling us to improve digital accessibility in all of our courses and contribute resources, expertise, and goodwill back to the community through our accessibility work in our courses. In 2020 Lumen reviewed almost 15,000 course content items for accessibility and made over 1,700 improvements to text and multimedia content. These improvements included ensuring accurate closed captions to video content, reviewing image alternative text for accuracy, revising hyperlinks for screen reader compatibility, and more.
Reviewing and revising our platforms
We recognize that in order to engage with accessible content, Lumen needs to provide courseware that is designed for, and usable by students and instructors of all abilities. Over the past year, as we’ve added features or improved functionality to our courseware, we’ve committed to identifying and improving the accessibility of our platforms.
For Waymaker, we launched a new assessment experience in the summer of 2020 which includes an accessibility menu. This menu allows students to set font size and color schemes for the assessments in order to optimize their individual experience.
In addition, recent changes to improve graded participation feedback allowed our engineering team to remove symbols from our study plan tiles which often confused screen readers. While it is exciting to add accessibility-focused functionality, we recognize there is also value in removing features or functionality that don’t significantly impact learning and present a barrier to equal access for all students.
In 2020 we also improved the assessment experience in our Online Homework Manager (OHM) courseware. We optimized the experience for screen reader users and made it easier for students of all abilities to navigate through their assignments. Updates to the user experience included a cleaner navigation and information display which improved usability for screen reader users.
Prioritizing what Lumen can do as a company to improve accessibility of content and platform experiences is just the first step in our commitment to inclusivity. Look for our upcoming blog post where we’ll share details about our partnership with Perkins Access, a division of Perkins School for the Blind.
Written by: Anika Ledlow (Assistant Course Product Manager) & Jeanette Koskinas (VP, Product)