Online Training - your help needed!

Hey there!

I'm with Crisis Text Line, the first national, free, 24/7 textline for people in crisis. We have over 600 trained volunteers on our platform.

We've discovered over time that the deaf communities have found our service especially helpful.. Text is a much more accessible medium for many people, so CTL has served as an alternative to hotlines for people with hearing loss.

Despite the number of D/deaf/hoh texters, our numbers aren't as strong with volunteers in those populations. The unfortunate truth: our training wasn't accessible. So we're changing that, but we need some advice.

If anyone knows a lot about best practices in online learning for D/d/hoh, I would LOOOOVE to chat with you.

- Jared

Truthfully, in my opinion, the best way to learn is to become it. I have been HOH for a long time, but I am slowly going deaf. The ear guy that makes wax ear molds can probably make you molds that will temporarily stop most of your normal hearing.

Borrow a white cane, put on dark glasses, insert your noise canceling molds and become me for a day. It is amazing what you will learn. The devil is in the details.

Do be careful; it's a risk. .

Online accessibility for Deaf/HOH really just means no reliance on sound... So quality captions for video, transcripts for audio, that kind of stuff.

Basically it's like linicx said, experience it. Just turn the audio on your computer off and see if you can use your training materials. Then make your content administrators and developers do the same thing when things are going to be changed.

Vision accessibility on the web is more complicated. For that, hire a couple devs who are section 508 knowledgeable, know what Aria is and how to use it properly, and let them create rules that govern content, layout, and design. This covers Deaf blind too, screen readers work with brail devices, and contrast and scale ability stuff (for low vision) is all part of 508 compliance.

And don't forget about motor impairments. Does your stuff work when you don't use a mouse? If not, it's not accessible to some people with motor impairments (wouldn't be so hot for some vision impaired folks either).