Our Approach
Updated April 2021
At Lumen Learning, we focus on making all our materials accessible rather than creating only a subset of materials that meet accessibility requirements. Access is an important part of our purpose—we can’t have the impact on learning results we seek if people don’t have access. Lumen course content is updated daily as part of our internal review and remediation process which targets common web accessibility issues.
Accessibility is considered upfront as an integral part of Lumen’s platform and product design process, ensuring an accessible user experience. As part of our Lumen Quality Assurance process, new features and significant code changes are also tested for accessibility using JAWS (using the latest version of Chrome) and NVDA (using the latest version of Firefox).
Lumen has worked with 3rd party providers to perform full platform VPAT reviews. We regularly review any issues reported by users or institutional partners and prioritize and resolve these issues as an integrated part of the team’s agile development process. Perkins Access has been contracted to provide user and expert reviews, inclusive design reviews, ongoing accessibility support, and expert standards guidelines.
Our current assessment of our accessibility
Lumen regularly assesses our progress toward inclusiveness using the voluntary product accessibility template (“VPAT”). The VPAT contains documentation on Section 508 and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Success Criteria & Conformance Requirements (Levels A, AA) with and evaluation of the additional 2.1 criteria conducted in Feb 2021.
These are our current VPATS:
Our Partnership with Perkins School for the Blind
As part of our commitment, Lumen Learning engaged with Perkins Access, a division of Perkins School for the Blind, to ensure that our platforms conform to the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (W3C WCAG) Version 2.1 Level AA requirements to the maximum extent possible. These guidelines explain how to make web content more accessible for people with disabilities. Perkins Access has been contracted to provide user and expert reviews, inclusive design reviews, ongoing accessibility support, and expert standards guidance.
What to do if you find a problem.
If you find something we’ve done that isn’t inclusive, we want to know about it. Please let us know by sending an email to support@lumenlearning.com. We promise to look into it and do our best to correct it. We may not be able to fix everything, and it might not be as quick as you (or we) would like, but we often fix issues very quickly.