Accessibility isn't an afterthought, it's in the design.

Accessible training documentation has become an industry standard. This means ensuring that a Microsoft Word document or PDF meets 

 in terms of its readability: visible contrast, organization, and order.

Now, if only there were a way to take any published document and push a button to make it accessible! Unfortunately, despite some really great tools that can take you most of the way, there is no magic button.

That's why at Flint, we build accessibility into our planning and processes for all the training materials we create for our clients and their learners. This is much more than making sure our eLearning modules and supporting documents can be read by assistive software tools like ZoomText or JAWS reader. Sometimes, it means looking at training materials in a different way from what you might expect.

Take infographics, for example. Infographics take detailed or complex information and metrics and summarize the key data points in small chunks laid out in conjunction with eye-catching supporting graphics. As they are easy to read at a glance, they're a great way to communicate information quickly, and are also extremely popular.

With that rise in popularity comes the need to make infographics accessible. Infographics are a special kind of document in that they are created with visual learners in mind. This means that the process to make them accessible requires planning from the top, in the design phase.

Here are some tips and considerations for designing and creating accessible infographics.

Don't create your infographic and then try to make it accessible later. This will likely lead to redesign and redevelopment. Design the infographic with accessibility in mind from the beginning.

2. Text-Based Communication of Key Information

Communicate key information in text form rather than in graphic form. Though this might sound counterintuitive to the goal of an infographic, it's essential to ensure that all learners receive the same important information. The graphics support the text, not the other way around. A pie chart is a good example: while it's visually useful to see the different sizes of the pie slices, the percentages are the key information. The pie chart visually supports the data.

In the design, ensure colour contrast, font sizes, text and graphic layouts, and object layering will meet accessibility guidelines. If your infographic is created using a tool such as Adobe InDesign or Illustrator, try to avoid a lot of layering of text over graphics. When text intermingles with graphics --- especially coloured graphics --- there is a risk of issues arising due to lack of contrast.

Infographics are unique because the content rarely conforms to the typical linear left-to-right, top-to-bottom format. Take a wheel- or cycle-style infographic. An assistive tool might not know in what order to read the text captions. Ideally, try to design for left-to-right, top-to-bottom reading. However, if that's not possible, use a tool such as Adobe Acrobat to manually set the reading order of text that doesn't appear in a linear order.

Publish infographics as PDFs and use an application such as Adobe Acrobat to apply accessibility formatting. Here, you can apply alt text (image descriptions) to images if necessary, keeping descriptions concise. You can also ensure the reading order of headings and body text is properly applied.

Once you've formatted the infographic for accessibility, test your document using assistive devices such as ZoomText and JAWS. Even though you've anticipated the learner experience and designed the infographic to be accessible, testing ensures that the bugs are worked out before the document is finally published and delivered to the learners.

Just like any project we undertake at Flint, planning and design before developing and publishing infographic documents is the smoothest way to meet accessibility standards, ensuring a positive learning experience for all users. 

 if you need assistance in creating accessible graphics for your next learning project. We look forward to discussing it with you!

Infographics are a great way to communicate information quickly, but they need to be accessible. Here are some tips and considerations for designing accessible infographics.

6 Tips for Creating Accessible Infographics

Accessible Infographics

It’s no stretch to say that it’s harder to keep people’s attention nowadays. With the current and upcoming generations of employees having YouTube and TikTok at their fingertips, learners have rapidly decreasing attention spans – some 

Now, more than ever, it’s important that L&D strategies grab learners’ attention and give them actionable help, rather than having them read lots of content and try to figure out how to apply it. Give learners what they need in a way that they want to receive it and can actually implement it.

So, with that in mind, here are four essential tactics to elevate your L&D for current and future learners’ needs:

Asking for learner feedback on their course experience is a vital part of the L&D process. Creating action points based on learner feedback is even more valuable.

Each learner has different circumstances and situations they come across each day. It may be advantageous to understand any pain points that they have during training and share some suggestions for improving the experience.

Especially in a post-pandemic era, people need people. Hybrid workers need to be able to work easily with each other, bounce off ideas and feel heard—no matter where they are working from.

Training can be a great way to encourage collaboration and keep the conversation flowing between teams. Social learning is a helpful and modern strategy that you should implement in your L&D plans, and really leans into the 20% of the 70/20/10 model.

3. Keep the connections alive through mentorship programs

It’s easy to feel disconnected from co-workers or managers in a fully or semi-remote workplace. By being creative, L&D experts use training and collaborative development to keep the connection between leaders and teams alive.

 is an important component of any workplace, and when partnered with courses, it can be a great tool to advance an employee in their job and career. It also helps break down silos and ensure structured time between senior and junior associates. Mentorship programs are particularly 

, who are the majority of the workforce today.

Investing in your leaders to help foster a culture of growth and development goes a long way. In remote settings, it’s much harder to foster employee engagement, so giving your organizational leaders specific, actionable tasks to help build their teams can go a long way.

All learning solutions – whether hybrid, in-person, or remote – should focus on helping learners implement training concepts into their everyday work. By extending learning beyond the classroom and giving employees actionable, tangible tasks to complete that reinforce formal learning, you can ensure sustained implementation of training concepts.

The best way to do this is through on-the-job activities—tangible and bite-sized tasks employees can do in their day-to-day to improve skills and capabilities while they carry out their roles.

Pushing the boundaries of learning beyond the classroom and integrating it into an employee’s workday is the best way to ensure long-term behavior change and help prove L&D’s impact to real business metrics.

Want to learn more about how Fortune 5000 companies are implementing these kinds of approaches? 

 to discuss innovative and effective learning strategies for your organization.

Boost L&D strategies with learner feedback, collaborative learning, mentorship, and practical tasks. Equip today's fast-paced learners for success!

Four Essential Tactics to Elevate Your L&D

Elevate Your L&D

We’re not quite in a recession, but it sure feels like it. Over the past year, company budgets have been cut in many industries, and the sad truth is that L&D is often one of the first to go.

Budget cutting is like pruning a tree: it has to be done so your organization can thrive in the long run. But it’s not always easy, and where and how much to cut can become a complicated calculation, especially when you’re introducing a new initiative.

Learning and Development departments around the world are making plans to keep their budgets from being over-pruned, and these plans need to be presented to the executives holding the shears. Below are a few tips that can help you convince your executives that your branch bears fruit:

1. Link Learning & Development to Wider Company Goals

Demonstrating how your learning programs directly connect to the company’s overall goals is one of the most important steps in getting executive buy-in. You will need to know your company’s strategy and in exactly which direction your company is heading.

By showing how your learning programs will contribute to these goals and support the company strategy, you prove you understand the role of your department as part of the bigger picture.

 When presenting your learning plan, make sure the link is super clear: don’t skip steps because the merits of the tool you want to use seem obvious to you. But you need to be conscious. Although you shouldn’t omit the obvious, it’s also not a good idea to spend too much time talking about the technical merits of an authoring tool, for example. Your executives are busy, so stick to the most important points.

Risk aversion can be one of the most difficult obstacles to overcome for new initiatives. This is especially true if your company is going through budget cuts. Nonetheless, there are a couple of things you can do to show your executives that you understand risk and are asking for a calculated risk rather than a reckless one.

Strong external references, past performance metrics, and a clear backup strategy are the best ways to prove your understanding. Having this data will let you put together a clear risk-management strategy that includes the thinking behind every decision you make, clear signals that identify poor performance quickly, and clear exit points if your backup plan doesn’t seem to be working.

While learner engagement, progress, and enjoyment are all critical factors, they are difficult to measure and connect to a clear return on investment (ROI). However, there are several things that can be immediately linked to metrics, such as employee productivity, job performance, and efficacy. Training is linked to real organizational needs, so developing SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Agreed Upon, Realistic, Time Based) for your initiative can help you demonstrate how training will support your company’s overall strategy.

A key component to uncovering the true outcome of a learning program is A/B testing. Without testing your programs, it’s nearly impossible to isolate training from other variables and show real-world impacts.

However, even though other industries like marketing have taken this important step, most of the L&D industry hasn’t made A/B testing a common practice. In the current climate of budget cuts, it’s necessary to innovate the way L&D is approached, providing an opportunity to explore how A/B testing can take training to the next level and save your budget from the executive pruners.

If you are looking for ways to prove the value of your learning programs, contact us to learn more about how top Fortune 5000 Companies are leveraging new and innovative ways to prove training ROI.

Convincing executives to invest in L&D during budget cuts: align learning goals, manage risk, and showcase measurable impact.

Three Tools to Get Executive Buy-In for Learning and Development

Learning and Development

Millennials currently represent about 50% of the global workforce, and in the next five years they will come to dominate 75% of it. This generational shift means we need to come up with innovative ways to train our workforce to upskill and reskill those set to take over.

So, what exactly are millennials looking for? Their needs differ vastly from those of Baby Boomers and Gen X. What will keep them motivated to continue to build on their skillset?

Creating exciting, dynamic learning plans for millennial learners requires careful thought and consideration. Captivating learning involves more than animations, infographics, and flashy effects.

Millennials grew up with digital technology, they’ve seen it all, and it’s increasingly hard to give them something fresh and attention-grabbing. Here are three training techniques to keep them engaged:

Why does gamification work? It’s simple. Each time the learner reaches a new achievement level, they feel a rush of excitement and pleasure — think points, levels, badges, and leaderboards.

Thanks to gamification, the learner’s brain gets the message that the learning they just did is worth pursuing for more than just the sake of completing an eLearning course.

What’s happening in the brain and body is the release of various feel-good hormones and neurotransmitters, including dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins. Think of it like a runner’s high. The gamification of eLearning creates positive associations with learning and compliance training, as learners are rewarded along the way.

Let’s face it. Gone are the days of long classroom training or eLearning modules. The current generation is used to bite-sized content that they can walk through at their own pace, in the corners of their time.

Microlearning reduces seat time while decreasing time to on-the-job application. When bite-sized learning content is easily accessible and digestible, learners can take it on in their own time, at their own pace.

In this approach, each piece of content generally addresses only 1-2 learning objectives, as opposed to the 5 or 6 typical of a standard hour-long module. Typically, microlearning vignettes don’t exceed 10-minute lessons — and even that is sometimes pushing it.

According to the findings of a survey on Learning and Development professionals, 94% of those surveyed said that they prefer microlearning to traditional eLearning courses because their learners prefer it.

Taking a microlearning approach can also help reduce overall seat time, keeping learners on the job and in the flow of their work much better than traditional learning modalities – saving the business money.

By breaking learning up into smaller pieces, there’s also more room for targeted application that helps differentiate and highlight key concepts better than leaving learners with a wall of text.

As a generation, millennials are already inundated with various digital media competing for their attention, and many have had too much of it. ELearning often doesn’t hit home the way it used to, even if interactive or gamified elements are used to their full effect.

People learn by doing, and millennials are no different. It’s a principle that we’ve held dear in the L&D industry for a long time, but in many cases, it can be hard to implement.

By taking an activity-based approach, you can help your people engage with others and learn where we know they do so the best — on the job.

According to the 70/20/10 model of learning, 70% of learning happens in job-related experiences. It only makes sense to invest most of our efforts to maximize learning in the flow of work.

On-the-job activity-based learning also opens a whole new world where proving the ROI of your efforts is within reach. By tacking activities onto existing learning programs and running A/B tests, you can prove with high confidence where the true impacts and value lie.

It is also simple to implement as this approach can be seamlessly overlaid on top of formal training to help reinforce key skills and practices in the flow of learners’ work.

This way, learning is not left behind in the classroom, and learners have actionable takeaways that help them implement the valuable theory you have already given them.

Interested in how companies like Purolator, Cummins, Sandals, and Softchoice are implementing these types of approaches and proving ROI?

Engaging millennial learners: Gamification, microlearning, and activity-based approaches create captivating training experiences.

Flint Sparks

6 Tips for Creating Accessible Infographics

Four Essential Tactics to Elevate Your L&D

Three Tools to Get Executive Buy-In for Learning and Development

Top Three Training Techniques to Engage Millennials