Making eLearning
Accessible — for Real

Why Accessible eLearning Is Still Rare

Digital learning has expanded dramatically over the past decade. The number of platforms, courses, and self-study tools has grown faster than most people can track. And yet, for a significant portion of learners — those with visual impairments, cognitive differences, hearing loss, motor disabilities, or low digital literacy — the experience of online learning remains fragmented, frustrating, or impossible.

The barriers are not always visible. A course that renders cleanly in a browser can be unreadable to a screen reader. A video module that seems complete fails entirely for someone who is deaf if captions are absent or auto-generated and incorrect. A well-intentioned interactive quiz becomes a series of obstacles for someone navigating with a keyboard rather than a mouse.

These are not edge cases. In Germany alone, roughly 10.4 million people live with a recognised disability. Many more navigate everyday inaccessibility without formal recognition. Accessible eLearning is not a niche need — it is a prerequisite for genuine participation in the digital economy and civil society.

The reason accessible eLearning remains the exception rather than the rule is straightforward: the people who build courses and platforms often do not know what they do not know. They have never used a screen reader. They have not tested their content with someone who has a cognitive disability. They lack the vocabulary to even ask the right questions. What was missing was not goodwill — it was structured, actionable knowledge, made available to the right people at the right time.

That is what this project set out to provide.

The Guidelines: What We Published

In collaboration with Aktion Mensch and Decentrale GbR, BIRNE7 co-developed and published two open-access guides on barrier-free eLearning. Both are freely available and designed for the people who most influence whether digital learning is accessible: the trainers who design courses, and the developers who build the platforms they run on.

For Trainers: Structuring Courses That Include Everyone

The trainer guide is aimed at people who design and deliver digital learning — instructional designers, facilitators, content authors, and organisations that commission eLearning modules. Its central premise is that accessible course design is not a retrofit. It is a set of decisions made at the beginning of the design process, not after the fact.

The guide walks through the key dimensions of accessible course creation:

• Language and comprehension: How to write content that is clear, direct, and comprehensible — including guidance on simple language (Einfache Sprache) and how it differs from plain language (Leichte Sprache). Concrete sentence structure recommendations and vocabulary guidance are included.
• Multimedia accessibility: Requirements for captions, audio descriptions, and transcripts. How to make video and audio content accessible to learners with sensory impairments, and how to validate that these elements actually work.
• Interaction and navigation: Design principles for interactive elements that can be operated without a mouse, completed without time pressure, and understood without prior technical knowledge.
• Testing and validation: Checklists for reviewing a course against accessibility criteria — both before and after production. The guide includes structured checklists that trainers can apply to their own content.
• Learner diversity: How to account for different user profiles without creating separate, segregated learning paths — the goal is a single, well-designed experience that serves a broad range of needs by default.

The guide is structured so that it can be read cover-to-cover or used as a reference for specific questions. Each section includes practical examples and a summary of the key decisions to make at each stage of course development.

For Developers: Building Accessibility Into the Platform

The developer guide addresses the technical layer — the engineers, architects, and front-end developers who build the environments in which digital learning happens. Even the most carefully designed course will fail learners if the platform it runs on is inaccessible.

The guide covers:

• Semantic HTML and ARIA: How to structure content in a way that assistive technologies — screen readers, refreshable Braille displays, switch access — can correctly interpret and present. This includes correct use of headings, landmarks, labels, and ARIA attributes where necessary.
• Keyboard accessibility: Every interaction that can be completed with a mouse must also be operable with a keyboard alone. The guide provides concrete implementation patterns for common eLearning interactions: navigation menus, modal overlays, carousels, progress controls, and form elements.
• Colour and contrast: Minimum contrast ratios for text and interactive elements, with guidance on colour-independent communication — ensuring that information is never conveyed by colour alone.
• Responsive and adaptive design: How content should reflow and remain functional at different viewport sizes and when users zoom in — a requirement often overlooked in platform builds.
• Performance and reliability: Accessible platforms must be stable and fast for users on assistive technologies, who may be using older hardware, slower connections, or browser environments that differ from a developer's test setup.
• Testing with real users and tools: Which automated testing tools cover which types of issues — and crucially, what automated tools cannot catch. The guide makes clear that no accessibility checker substitutes for testing with actual screen reader users and people with cognitive disabilities.

Both guides include checklists that can be used as part of a development or review process — not as a compliance box-ticking exercise, but as a practical tool for teams who want to ship something that actually works.

The Platform Launch: Three Free Courses

Alongside the published guidelines, BIRNE7, Aktion Mensch, and Decentrale GbR built something practical: a free, self-paced eLearning platform with three courses addressing topics where digital barriers have real consequences for everyday life and work.

The platform itself is hosted by Aktion Mensch and reflects the principles in the guidelines — it was designed to be accessible from the ground up, not retrofitted. Courses can be paused and resumed at any point. Each learner moves at their own pace. Registration is free.

What the Courses Cover

The three courses were chosen because they address barriers that consistently appear across BIRNE7's research — in employment, in document-based communication, and in the language used by institutions and organisations. Each is substantial: not a short orientation module but a full learning experience designed to produce real capability.

Wegweiser zur Arbeit — Guide to Employment

For many people with disabilities, the process of finding and securing employment is not just difficult — it is opaque. The institutions involved are numerous, their processes are complex, and the language they use is rarely clear. Wegweiser zur Arbeit addresses this directly: it provides a structured, accessible guide to employment rights, support services, and the practical realities of entering or returning to work with a disability in Germany.

The course covers the roles of the Federal Employment Agency (Bundesagentur für Arbeit), integration offices (Integrationsämter), rehabilitation providers, and employers — explaining not just what each body does but how they interact and what a person can realistically expect from them. It includes concrete guidance on requesting adjustments, navigating the assessment process, and understanding what support is legally required versus what must be negotiated.

At approximately ten hours, it is designed for people who need a thorough understanding — not a quick orientation. The course can be completed across multiple sessions, and progress is saved.

Barrierefreie Dokumente erstellen — Creating Accessible Documents

Documents — PDFs, presentations, spreadsheets — are among the most common forms of information exchange in professional and institutional life. They are also among the most consistently inaccessible. Most are created by people who have never tested their output with a screen reader or considered how it would be navigated by someone who cannot see the visual layout.

This course addresses the practical skills needed to change that. It works through the standard tools — Microsoft Office and LibreOffice — and teaches participants how to structure headings correctly, add meaningful alternative text to images, ensure reading order matches visual order, create accessible tables, and export documents that retain their accessibility properties as PDFs.

Critically, the course does not stop at production. It includes verification techniques: how to use built-in accessibility checkers, how to interpret their output, and what they cannot catch that requires manual testing. Participants who complete the course leave with both the skills and the habits to create documents that are actually usable.

Einfache Sprache lernen — Learning Simple Language

Language is one of the most persistent and underacknowledged barriers in digital — and institutional — communication. Complex sentence structures, technical vocabulary, long paragraphs, and passive constructions exclude a large portion of any audience: people with cognitive disabilities, people learning German as a second language, older adults less comfortable with formal written language, and many others.

Einfache Sprache (Simple Language) is a set of writing principles designed to address this. It is distinct from Leichte Sprache (Easy Language), which follows a stricter, formally standardised ruleset. Einfache Sprache is more flexible — accessible but not so constrained that it becomes difficult to apply across general content. This course teaches participants to distinguish between the two approaches and to apply Einfache Sprache in practice: how to shorten and simplify sentences, which vocabulary to avoid, how to test comprehensibility, and how to revise existing content.

The course is relevant for communicators, content managers, public-facing organisations, and anyone who writes for an audience that includes people who might struggle with standard institutional or digital language.

Why This Partnership Worked

Projects like this one require a particular kind of collaboration — one where the different partners bring genuinely distinct, complementary contributions rather than overlapping in the same area.

Aktion Mensch is one of Germany's largest private funders of social projects, with deep institutional reach and a long track record in disability inclusion. Their ability to commission, host, and distribute the platform — and to make it available at no cost to learners — was essential. Without a credible, stable home for the courses, the work would not reach the people it was designed for.

Decentrale GbR brought technical depth and the capacity to build a platform that actually reflected the accessibility principles the project was documenting. Building an accessible eLearning environment is harder than building a conventional one — it requires sustained attention to technical detail and a genuine commitment to testing with real users. Decentrale provided that.

BIRNE7 contributed the research foundation: direct knowledge of the barriers people encounter in digital environments, built through years of co-creation with people who navigate inaccessible systems every day. That knowledge shaped the course content, the structure of the guidelines, and the testing approach — ensuring that what was produced was grounded in what actually blocks people, not just what developers assume might.

The most valuable contribution BIRNE7 makes is often not the finished product. It is the precisely described problem — grounded in real experience — that enables others to act on it.

How to Access Everything

All of the outputs from this project are freely and publicly available. The guidelines can be downloaded directly as PDFs. The courses require free registration on the Aktion Mensch platform.