First Udemy Certificate!

True, it is just a 3.5 hour course, but I've suspected a lot of us have fallen down the Udemy rabbit hole. It looks like I'm at about a 30-38% average completion rate, so hitting that 100% was a little more exciting than I realized it would be :)

The course I completed was Creating Accessible Websites by Stefany Newman. Why did I chose that one? Can't quite recall. Would I choose this one again? Can't quite answer that, either. But it's not because it wasn't good. I just truly don't have much to compare it to at this early stage of my accessibility learning.

Not long ago, I was able to chat with an accessibility auditor, and one of the main points I came away with is that making accessible tech can include interpretation at times. There are a lot of guidelines. That doesn't make them hard and fast rules everywhere 100% of the time. But a person has to start somewhere! And that is what I am doing.

Taking this course makes me want to learn more. I want to see where those guidelines tend to fall given various circumstances. If much bias might even exist within areas of the field (bias likely exists everywhere, right?)

This course made me excited to learn more. To figure out how to get the screen reader to pronounce my first name in english and my last name in dutch (even though according to how I understand the rules of english, the screen reader is still somehow messing up). I would like to figure out how to add alt text to the image of the gray and white rabbit at the top of this screen!

Ultimately, I would like to say, thank you, Stefany Newman, for making me even more excited about learning about accessibility.

Photo by Gavin Allanwood on Unsplash

Comments

[GrahamTheDev]

Great stuff and this really resonates with me as I literally just started looking at the feasibility of creating a udemy course (as they all seem to have mistakes even in the previews so I worry what the courses get wrong!) and looked at that exact course to see what the quality was like / what was expected.

Is there anything that could have been better in the course (I know you said it was the first one in accessibility, I mean more in terms of what works well and what doesn't work from a student perspective presentation and content wise).

Sorry for all the questions, as I said you just happened to post at a time when I was thinking about it!

Oh and as for pronunciation of your name using two different languages the mark-up would be:

<p>Hi my name is
  <span lang="en">Jessica</span>
  <span lang="nl">Woudsma</span>
</p>

In fact the first span would be unnecessary if the page language was in English (same if the page language was in Dutch you could remove the second span)

Oh and may I humbly point you to an article I just released that you could use as a bit of a roadmap on things to learn: dev.to/inhuofficial/101-digital-ac...

Keep going, we need more people who create accessible products ❤🦄!

[Jessica Woudsma]

Thank you for your comment! And your questions are more than okay.

Everyone has a different learning style, so my comments might not be applicable across the board. One of the things in the course is that the instructor will show or refer to something, and then say something like "Just don't do that". Sometimes, there is a bit of an explanation, other times, not really. Often, information does not click for me when it is presented in a "just don't do that" sort of way.

One of the things I did love about the course was going through a website she made, using the screen reader, and then hopping into the code and fixing the issues. Seeing someone's workflow, especially if they know what they are doing, really helps me learn.

Hopefully those bits of feedback help you out!

And thank you for offering the language suggestion. I wasn't clear in my post- I am trying to use the span lang within an aria-label so when a screenreader lands on an icon for something like Dev.To, it can clearly say where it will lead the user if they click. I'm sure it's simple :)

[GrahamTheDev]

dev.to/inhuofficial/101-digital-ac...

Point 60 is about “visually hidden” or “screen reader only” text.

You can’t do what you want with aria-label But by placing visually hidden text inside the link that provides text for a screen reader. You can still use the Lang technique that way.

Another way would be to use aria-labelledby. This takes the ID(s) of elements on a page that contain the text you want to use as a label.

So you can do aria-labbelledby=“ID1 ID2” and give the first span ID1, second span ID2.

Sorry I am on phone so hard to do full examples.

Your feedback on the courses is very valuable so thank you for that!