Accessibility Training Behind the Scenes and Bloopers That Were Too Good Not to Share
If you have recently explored the Web Services Web Workshops page, you may have noticed a new training has appeared in the sidebar.
Over the past few months, my fellow co-op, Charlie, and I have created a self-guided accessibility training intended to teach website editors current accessibility best practices in web design.
If you have read or seen our training, you might be convinced that Charlie and I are expert training creators.
The behind-the-scenes process of the accessibility training was not as flawless as you might expect.
There were several steps that we took to create this training. To list a few:
- Research for the modules
- Writing and creating the modules
- Reviewing and asking for feedback on the modules
- Making slides (visuals) for video scripts
- Reviewing and asking for feedback on the scripts
- Recording the videos
- Editing the visuals and recordings
- Reviewing and asking for feedback on the visuals and recordings
- Posting the videos on YouTube
- Inserting captions into the videos
- Putting everything together
- Reviewing the completed modules
To receive a more in-depth idea of the steps we had to take to complete this training, be sure to read this post written by one of our past co-ops, Krist: https://carleton.ca/webservices/2022/fantastic-training-modules-and-how-we-make-them/
As there are multiple steps we had to take to create this training, there are a few challenges that we had to overcome throughout this process.
Below are a few of our favourite “mishaps” or “bloopers” that occurred behind the scenes of our accessibility training.
Mishaps and Bloopers
During one of the reviewing stages, Charlie noticed that one of my comments appeared to be written more than a few decades ago. When this was brought up during one of our stand-up morning meetings, one of the Web Services developers, Michael Corkum, explained that “the 7:00 pm, December 31, 1969, is because our time zone is UTC-5. Unix is the operating system that runs all our webpages, and web applications show time as interpreted by the system time.”
For those unfamiliar with developer or coding language, Unix time is “the number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1st, 1970 00:00:00 UTC,” according to the site Narrative Knowledge Base.
Other times, technology did not work in our favour and we had to use each other’s brains to come up with a solution.
The screenshot above is from a conversation between Charlie and me when we were unable to insert a table into a slideme on the CMS site we were using to create the modules. Eventually, Charlie was able to use their extensive CMS knowledge to fix this problem.
Charlie and I realized early on that recording the videos for the training would take more than a few takes until we got the right one. As it turns out, the world around you does not go silent when recording audio for the videos.
So, we encountered a few unexpected noises while recording our audio. These included, but were not limited to, roommates slamming doors, singing birds, a noisy fan and noisy air conditioning, garbage trucks, and any other noise you could imagine.
Another unexpected barrier Charlie and I had to overcome is that the previously-used software for editing our training videos, FilmForth, decided to add an unremovable watermark to exported videos. As a result, we ended up using Adobe Premiere Pro as our primary video editing software.
Here is a sneak peek of what my laptop screen looked like while editing in Premiere Pro. Trust me when I say it looks more complicated than it is. Charlie and I recorded multiple takes for our scripts until the audio was as close to perfect as we could get. This saved us from making additional audio edits in post (a task that isn’t easy for Premiere beginners!).
Although my fellow co-op and I encountered a few mishaps and challenges while creating this training, two brains are better than one and we were able to come up with solutions to these mishaps, resulting in a well-researched self-guided accessibility training. Even better, our two brains were helped by multiple other brains from the Web Services and Coordinated Accessibility Strategy Team. A huge thank you to everyone who helped out with this training!
Now that you have seen all the hard work that went into creating this accessibility training, we hope you are ready to begin the training! Throughout this process, we learned a lot about accessibility, and we hope you can learn a thing or two as well.