Launching an accessibility training course with Umbraco

Launching an accessibility training course with Umbraco

We’re excited and proud to launch an accessibility training course with our friends at Umbraco HQ. The Umbraco Accessibility course was announced yesterday on the official Umbraco blog and will be available on Umbraco TV from the 17th of February.

Why create an accessibility course with Umbraco?

Worldwide there are over 1 billion people estimated to be living with a long-term disability: that’s roughly 1 in 7 people or 15% of the global population. And with people living longer, that figure is increasing. There are over 14 million disabled people in the UK alone.

By making your digital solutions accessible, you are acting ethically to ensure that all potential users, including people with disabilities now and in the future, can experience things equally. You are also reaching more people, which makes good business sense.

You may also be breaking the law if your website or other digital solution doesn’t meet certain accessibility standards, such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and there are specific laws and regulations in place across the world. In the UK, this includes the Equality Act 2010, the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, and the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

At Sigma, we’re part of the Umbraco Backoffice Accessibility Team, a community initiative to make the Umbraco CMS inclusive for everyone. This work is incredibly important but we wanted to take things further to help ensure the amazing solutions people build every day using Umbraco are also inclusive and provide a great experience for everyone.

Course format and content

The two-hour course is broken into several chapters on Umbraco TV and available on-demand. This format and approach will hopefully allow more people to take the course and at their own pace.

The course has been carefully curated and covers a lot of ground in two hours, from accessibility basics, including guidelines, compliance and testing, to practical advice working with Umbraco and also accessible front-end code (HTML, CSS and JS).

Furthermore, it provides access to an extensive list of tools and resources to explore beyond the course material.

Thanks to our team and Umbraco HQ

A big thank to Umbraco for allowing us to collaborate on this, especially Gabriel Ionut Brumea and Rheannon A. Lefever who look after all things training at Umbraco HQ, and our wonderful team who contributed:

• Molly Watt, Usability and Accessibility Consultant
• Danny Lancaster, Test Analyst and Umbraco MVP
• Rachel Breeze, Senior Developer and Umbraco MVP
• Shane Prendergast, Front End Team Lead
• Kath Rickards, Project Manager

If you need further help or advice, please get in touch

We work with a range of clients across sectors to improve the accessibility and inclusivity of their digital solutions. This includes accessibility training, manual and automated audits, inclusive usability testing and writing accessibility statements. Please get in touch if you would like to know more.