The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) is the Nation's largest integrated health care system. The Employee Education System (EES) maintains and advances VHA's state-of-the-art learning delivery models and fosters innovative training opportunities such as virtual and self-directed learning. Ensuring that online and on-the-job training is accessible to all learners, including those with disabilities, is mission-critical for EES.
Designing online training that is accessible to all learners can pose a dilemma for instructional designers. In the case of compliance with accessibility regulations—spelled out in Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act (29 U.S.C. 794d)—designers have sometimes abandoned optimal instructional strategies in favor of those that will support accessibility, particularly for vision-impaired learners who use assistive technologies like screen readers.
An on-going collaborative effort between EES and a non-profit research and development team takes the position that instructional designers should have the freedom to design engaging training, regardless of audience constraints, by enlisting technology that transforms the final product to meet the needs of all learners.
The authors present a case study of innovative Section 508-compliant training recently implemented in support of the VHA Office of Telehealth Services. The ground-breaking approach focuses on innovation, not compromise—dynamically transforming interactive training content to an accessible format on-demand. The content transformation process reformats the original multimedia training content, displaying it as rich-media interactive, 508-compliant HTML5 for learners who choose this view. The multimedia and accessible display formats are both generated from a single-source content file, which is built from a library of instructional interaction templates.
The authors provide detailed information on the design and development of the Telehealth training and present lessons learned and recommendations. In addition, thoughts on next steps will focus on enhancements to ensure training is effective and accessible across both desktop and mobile display formats.