Improvements for making and finding accessible content

At Udemy, we believe that learning should be for everyone, which is why we recently introduced new resources to help you create more accessible content. As part of our continued investment in accessibility, we’re making a few more improvements to our platform:

 

1.   We’re updating the course building experience to help you assess and indicate how accessible your content is.

Today, you can already add subtitles or captions to your course, and we automatically generate subtitles in multiple languages for courses with at least 20 enrollments. 

Now, we’re adding a new “Course accessibility” page to the course builder. This page will provide accessibility checklists for your captions, audio content, and course materials. These checklists are aligned to the United States’ Section 508 standard of compliance for accessible content. If you determine that your content meets the standards presented, you can also mark your content as accessible on this page.

Marking your content as accessible will make it easier for learners with accessibility needs to find. This is not a requirement to publish content on Udemy, but it’s recommended to maximize the total possible audience for your content. Read more about marking your content as accessible in the Help Center.

Note that if you mark your content as accessible when it doesn’t actually meet the stated requirements, your course may lose its accessibility status, and you may face Trust & Safety penalties. If you’re unsure whether your content meets the requirements, you can reach out to [email protected] for help making this assessment.

 

 

 

2.   We’re introducing new landing page indicators and search filters to help learners with accessibility needs find the content that’s right for them.

Historically, we haven’t given learners tools to differentiate between subtitles and captions: 

• Subtitles represent only the spoken content of a course
• Captions go beyond spoken text to provide other valuable context for hearing-impaired learners, like representations of musical cues (e.g. “upbeat music”) and indications of intonation (e.g. “exclaims,” “whispers,” etc.). 

With our updates to the course builder, we’re introducing new ways for learners to identify content that meets their accessibility needs. We’ve added a new search filter and a landing page indication for courses with fully accessible captions (see below).

 

As we continue to find new ways to improve lives through learning, we hope you’ll take advantage of these new tools and rewards for creating accessible learning content. You can check out guidance on creating accessible content right here in the Teaching Center.