Launching the Accessibility Course

The on-demand course is here!

Written by: Gabriel Ionut Brumea

From today, we’re proud to offer you the Umbraco Accessibility Course. A 2-hour, on-demand course that will kick-start your journey into making your website more accessible, helpful and friendly for all your visitors. We have teamed up with CMS accessibility experts from Sigma to ensure that you not only get taught best practice Umbraco but also best practice in terms of accessibility. The course is out now - and if you hurry, there’s currently a friendly intro-discount sticker on it.

An in-demand course

As mentioned in last week’s blog post, 1 in 7 people worldwide has a long-term disability.

Disabilities that call for special needs and resources in order to help these people e.g. read, navigate, see, understand etc. These needs expand to the web and have, especially in recent years, become a more and more important topic.

By focusing on improving the accessibility of your website, you’re automatically making your site more inclusive, helpful and friendly to more people. And as you know, friendly is our middle name 😉 so we are very excited to be adding this course to our offerings, supporting you in making your Umbraco websites even friendlier.

Who should go on this course?

In order to help you get started with web accessibility, we, together with our Gold Partner and web accessibility experts Sigma, have put together a course where you’ll learn the basics concepts about accessibility and how to implement them on your Umbraco website.

As you’ll be taught hands-on, front-end implementation in Umbraco, we especially recommend this course to developers with Umbraco experience (we recommend the Fundamentals course prior to this course). Project Managers or Product Owners leading a project where website accessibility is a requirement can also benefit from the course.

“I felt that the course is a very good starting point or even more than a starting point towards Accessibility and Inclusive Design. It is very well put together, compact and incredibly informative. I found that it can appeal not only to developers but also project managers and product owners who wish to understand the topic.”
Poornima Nayar, Freelance Developer, community course tester.

What you’ll learn

The course takes around 2 hours where you’ll be guided through these topics:

Inclusive Design
Assistive Technologies
Working with Umbraco
Accessible HTML, CSS and JS

The course is based on presentations and demos and also includes a “hands-on” aspect, so you can test what you learn in a sandbox before you go on and apply it to your own site.

“The course is a great introduction to accessibility concepts and how to implement these ideas within an Umbraco project. With real-life examples, the course shows you how some simple updates can help you make your site more accessible.”
Owain Williams, Umbraco .Net Developer, community course tester.

Furthermore, you get access to an extensive list of tools and resources for you to go and explore on your own so you can dive even deeper into the topic.

By the end of the course, you will walk away with a basic knowledge of accessibility and how to make your Umbraco websites more accessible. And, of course, a certification badge for you to show off your new skills and your new focus on accessibility.

An on-demand course

“The format helps me do the course when I have the time to sit down and focus. I can rewind and watch parts over and over again, and I can even control the speed of the video if I think it's going too fast which is very useful.” Poornima Nayar, Freelance Developer, community course tester.

The course is a 2-hour on-demand course, which means that once you’ve purchased it, it’s up to you when you watch it and when you complete the test.

Test? Yes, similar to all our other courses there will be a test for you to complete. Once passed, you’ll be rewarded with a special Accessibility certification badge to proof your new skills (no certification points).

After purchasing, the course will be available to you on Umbraco TV (step-by-step instructions will follow in the purchasing email).

Get your hands on the course today! (with 25% off!)

Do you want to up your accessibility-game and make your website, or that of your clients, more friendly for more visitors?

There’s no wait - the course is up now, and as a friendly encouragement we’ve added a 25% introductory discount if you buy before the 3rd of March at 16 CET using this link €350 €262:

Buy the course with discount now

Last but not least - H5YR and thank you! 🙏

A massive H5YR (High-5-You-Rock) goes out to the Sigma team for joining us and getting this course up and running!

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

And a big H5YR also goes out to the members of the Umbraco Accessibility team, who have all made a big effort in highlighting the need for website accessibility in Umbraco - and who have already made several accessibility contributions to the CMS 🙌

Thank you - you rock! 🙏

Psst...Want to meet your trainers? 🎓 Head over to last week’s teaser blog post and get an introduction to the 3 trainers you’ll meet on the course.