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Making Learning Accessibility Easier

Tips for Educators and Trainers

AIDC 2026

Wojtek Kutyla / Human Thing Ltd

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Hello there,

Waving at you from Edinburgh, UK

Wojtek Kutyla / Human Thing Ltd

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Accessibility is hard

Give all your students an A at the start

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Doing accessibility vs. teaching accessibility

Great experts are rarely great teachers

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How to build a great accessibility training

10 tips with a bonus

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1. Understand your students

Who are these people and what are they like?

Wojtek Kutyla / Human Thing Ltd

Who are these people you're going to teach? Very often we don't even know. We just appear at the time of the session, ready to rock.

If you're very experienced, you'll manage.

But I like to ask people who commission training about my audience.

I want to know what they're doing and how technical or visually-minded they are.

I want to hear about their challenges.

You can send each person a short form to fill prior to the session to tell you who they are.

You can write them individual introduction emails with a prompt to reply.

You can look at them on LinkedIn.

Do some research.

When you have it, you can tailor the language and learning goals to the type of your audience.

It goes without saying that you'd approach teaching web developers differently to UX designers.

But it goes deeper than that. What are their pronouns? How much do they know about accessibility already?

And why are they coming to your training? Did their boss send them, or do they just want to learn it and feel a passion for it?

If you can't ask these questions before you start your training, make them into an icebreaker session.

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2. Have a code of conduct

Setting expectations

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3. Make the message palatable 🍰

Don't be boring, pal

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4. Tell stories of human experience

Make difficult concepts easy to understand

Wojtek Kutyla / Human Thing Ltd

Consider these two ways of explaining what WCAG is.

WCAG is a set of guidelines that people should look at when designing digital systems. It has four sections: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Robust. Each section has a number of guidelines at three levels of conformance: A, AA and AAA. These come with techniques and methods. When a person uses a website or an app, they have to be able to perceive it in a way that's most appropriate. They also have to operate it, and understand what they're working with. If the website (or an app) are robust enough, it all works well. There is a set of guidelines called WCAG, that all designers, developers, and content folks can look upon to make it work. It's split into four sections, just like that experience: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust. And it comes at three levels of compliance, from A to AAA. We want our work to meet the AA level of these guidelines.

The deal here is to always, always abstract accessibility down to the level of human experience. User experience. WCAG is not a Holy Grail, and it's not a solution to everything. It's out there for us to be used through the context of how a person works with the technology they have.

Stories always bring more flavour to training.

Show videos of people using things (YouTube is full of them).

Tell a story of your mum who lives with arthritis paying her bills.

Ask people to use the computer with just keyboard for five minutes, whilst their mics and webcams are on.

Be mindful that you'll never be able to simulate an experience of disability, but you can awake empathy in people.

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5. Show, don't tell

Learning by doing works best

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6. Use less slides, make it light

Death by PowerPoint is real

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7. Facilitate group work

Brains work better at a scale

Wojtek Kutyla / Human Thing Ltd

It's not you who should be doing most work when running a training session. To learn people have to train. Do things themselves.

And this works best in groups. You can use your online calling software rooms feature to build and facilitate interactions between groups of people.

Always write your training with group work in mind. Consider different disabilities and assistive technology; not everyone will be able to use Miro or Figma Jam together, but they should be able to chat, whether with voice or text.

Use the framework of Liberating Structures to make it work.

For those of you who don't know, LS is a set of group exercises that mobilise even the quietest and shy people to work together. Techniques such as 1-2-4-All or Options Place can make a huge difference to how people think.

If you're running group work, visit the rooms and supervise the work. People will be asking questions and you can help them when they're stuck.

This was all much easier when we had offline learning, but it's still amazing online.

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8. Consider flipping your classroom

Have them come prepared and ready

Wojtek Kutyla / Human Thing Ltd

Flipped classroom is this: make people watch videos and read text earlier, and have them come prepared. Then do practical exercises to turn knowledge into skills.

This works a great deal. Why?

Everyone can watch at their own time. This helps with busy schedules.You can record yourself talking and explaining things you want to cover once, and don't have to repeat.If you're smart about it, the message can be still quite universal (although of course it's much harder to alter it in comparison to presenting live).You can make it very interesting and lively when meeting people, and there will be more time for banter.It's easier for people to come back to your videos later if they want to recap.With video transcripts they will be able to learn at their own pace, and you will make it more inclusive than learning focused on real-time (even if with live captions).

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9. Always do a recap (later)

Avoid ideas and skills evaporating

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10. Offer recordings

Allow people to return to things they need

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11. Bonus: make mistakes

Authenticity in the era of robots

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How should they feel?

Leave an impression

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Thank you

Can I help you somehow?

Email: wojtek@humanthing.works

Find me on LinkedIn!

Wojtek Kutyla / Human Thing Ltd