The test passed, but no one can use it.
I once saw a store clerk trying to complete a mandatory training module on his cell phone during a break. My screen is broken. The interior of the store was so loud that the acoustics were useless. He was wearing work gloves, so each tap landed half an inch off. He gave up after about 4 screens and later marked it as done from his friend’s account. This will tell you exactly how clogged it is. The course passed all accessibility checks given. The screen reader label was correct. Color contrast met standards. And the person for whom it was made was not yet able to use it. That’s because the checks it passed didn’t measure what was holding him back. The design of the floor is also important.
Compliance accessibility is necessary but not sufficient
I’d like to note here that accessibility efforts are my area of expertise, and I’m not going to comment too much on standards. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are there for a good reason, and screen reader users’ inability to complete courses is a real failure that needs to be fixed. None of that matters. Meeting these standards is a foundational floor for construction and is not something to skip.
But somewhere along the way, the word “accessible” was quietly narrowed down to mean “passing an automated scan.” And in manufacturing, that definition excludes most of the people you’re actually trying to reach. Standards are necessary. That’s not all work. Designing a floor means considering real-world conditions.
Conditions that the course never met
Consider who is actually receiving their front-line training and where. Many of them read English as a Second Language (ESL) and lose vocabulary in modules written at a college reading level long before the content becomes difficult. Many of them don’t have computers at work and only view courses on their phones, often older phones with smaller screens. In the shop, the signal is spotty, so video-intensive modules that rely on a stable connection will stop and buffer until finished.
And there’s usually no quiet place to do it. This course was designed with someone sitting at a desk, in a quiet room, with a large monitor, a fast connection, and no one waiting. Just 10 minutes between work can be consumed standing up in the background noise, using a cracked cell phone. Few design assumptions remain after the journey from desk to store.
None of these assumptions are wrong in and of themselves. They are simply invisible to the person making them because they are the conditions in which that person works every day. The problem is that each of them is a small bet on the learner’s environment, and where the actual work is done, those bets are quietly lost. Modules that require a stable connection will be disconnected in areas where the signal is weak. The careful taps that seem to go out the window with gloves on, and the quiet moments that set the pace, never arrive amidst the noise. The design doesn’t take into account where the learning actually happens, so it falls apart there.
Designed to fit the floor, not the desk
Most of the modifications that are useful in floor design are not uncommon. Write to the reading level of the person on site, not the person who signed the contract, and cross-check with actual employees on site rather than guessing. Assuming a cell phone, small screen, and gloves first, the tap target will be larger and the required accuracy will be lower. Assume that when the connection is broken, the module does not lose progress and works in short increments despite the signal. Because we assume noise, the important stuff doesn’t just exist in the audio.
Especially for ESL workers, plain language is more useful than anything you can add in the bolt. Keep sentences short, words general, and present one idea at a time. However, it is easy to misunderstand, so please clarify what you mean by plain language here. The simplifications you are making are to the connective tissue around the sentence structure and necessary terminology. The condition itself remains the same. Coating operators still need to read “potlife” and the actual product name. Because work and safety data is written in that language. Nouns imply precision, and so do logics such as “if only,” “before,” and the order in which steps are performed. In safety-related work, when “after” softens to “when,” the language must not be simplified and ambiguous. Reducing the reading level does not sacrifice technical accuracy. Leave both the exact terminology and the exact conditions intact to make the sentence easier to understand.
And the simplest action to cross the language gap is to stop making up words, which is often the only way. I mean exactly that because the tempting shortcut is to replace text with pictures, and that’s a step backwards. Screen reader users, people searching for terms, and readers who process written steps better than visual steps all still need words. Therefore, by keeping the words and combining them with clear pictures and short demonstrations, the meaning gets to the person’s head through multiple routes. Workers decoding a second language under time pressure can rely on images. Readers who need the text still have it. Showing alongside telling is more frequent than telling alone than people might expect. And just as the underlying plain language efforts ended up helping everyone, the curb cuts ended up helping far more people than they targeted.
real test
There is one check that detects almost all of these, but it is not a scan. Attach the finished module to a cheap cell phone, take it to a real-life environment, and try to overcome it yourself, including noise, gloves, and a speckled signal. It takes about 5 minutes to find the problem, but it’s not an issue that gets flagged by automated tools. This is an important test for a successful floor design.
If the scan passes, you will know that you can open the course with assistive technology. This is important and must continue. Whether the person doing the job would be able to survive it in a real-life situation is another question, and at this point most of the industry only has the first answer. If you answer both, you’ve built something that can actually be used on the front lines.
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