Goldsmiths - University of London

Online learning and accessibility

Usability

In the context of online learning materials, the word "usability" refers to the ease with which learners use the applications, web pages or files you created for them.
When producing learning materials that will be available online, their usability is an important factor to consider in the process, and it is important that materials get evaluated at an early stage. User testing gives you best insight into whether or not your design is of a high usable quality. In most cases there are some simple guidelines to bear in mind before you make them available:

Text documents, image files, video and audio:

• Format Word documents so that titles and paragraphs are clearly designated
• Use non-serif fonts, e.g. Arial; do not use too many colours; and stick to font colour conventions: blue underlined text is used to indicate a hyperlink, so don’t use it merely for decoration
• Keep paragraphs short so that text does not appear overwhelming
• Consistency makes for easier reading – make sure your formatting and colour choices are consistent throughout your document and related documents, and do not distract from the core content of what you want to say.
• Keep image files (jpegs) as small as possible whilst still maintaining adequate quality – users may have different (smaller) screen sizes, and images should not take too long to download.
• Add alt-tags to images, which contain a simple, short but adequate text description of the image content.
• Provide different quality versions of your video for different Internet acces
• Opt for smallest file size possible whilst maintaining acceptable quality
• Add, where possible, subtitles to your video or transcripts as alternatives; always provide transcripts of your audio files if they contain spoken text.

For more information contact celt@gold.ac.uk.