Creating accessible virtual labs isn't as straightforward as adhering to WCAG guidelines. Labster's Accessibility Lead shares the principles that guide Labster's decisions about making immersive science simulations.
TRANSCRIPT:
[00:00:06] My name's Victoria. I'm a product marketing manager here at Labster, and I'm joined by Monika, product manager and accessibility expert. So, Monika, I'd love to talk to you about why accessibility is so important when it comes to STEM education.
[00:00:20] Accessibility for us is ensuring that all the students, they are equal and they have equal access and opportunities to participate in STEM education. And as we all know, a lot of these programs are a bit challenging in the terms of like experiments and field work and things like this. And not all the students are able to participate in those. That's why we are enabling them to be equal and inclusive and provide this learning environment that they might not have with traditional educational materials.
[00:00:58] And could you tell us a bit about the WCAG 2.1 guidelines?
[00:01:03] Yes. These are web content accessibility guidelines, and these are internationally recognized guidelines for creating content, digital content, for students and users with various disabilities. They are internationally recognized by a lot of institutions, countries, and state governments, and they are our guiding light to provide and make our content accessible. Unfortunately, they are created mainly for websites. And if any other web content that is not like a website in mind, like immersive simulations, it's a bit challenging and more complex to interpret those guidelines. But we are doing our best to provide the same experience for all students.
[00:01:57] And with those those two things in mind then. could you tell us a bit about Labster's commitment to accessibility?
[00:02:04] Yes. So our main focus is on simulations, so our main product that we provide. More than half of our catalog is right now available with various, accessibility enhancements and features. And this enables, at least in my opinion, students that normally would not be able to access the lab for various risk reasons and impairments and disabilities to actually experience those experiments by themselves. When we talk about these accessible features, we're covering a very wide range of disabilities. So we provide keyboard navigation and a built-in screen reader for vision-impaired students. We care that our materials are colorblind-friendly. We provide audio features, visual feedback, and also what is sometimes not available in a physical lab: you can stop time. So no activity is time-dependent. You can always come back. You can enhance graphics that you can see, you can repeat the experiments. And obviously, you're not restricted by the physical boundaries of a real-life lab.
[00:03:22] Amazing. So what is on the horizon?
[00:03:27] Yes. So as I mentioned before. Giving this equal access, accessible access to STEM, and especially when it comes to science, simulation is a very complex and long journey, and we recognize that we are just at the beginning of it. So we currently are, let's say, at the first iteration of all the accessibility improvements that we could provide. And right now we're not only increasing the coverage of the catalog with those simulations being available, but we also continuously iterate on them. So we are gathering feedback from the institutions, and we're trying to understand how to make that experience better. On top of it, we are collaborating with more universities that have this accessibility as their priority in mind. They want to be supportive and inclusive and have this positive reputation as well being legally compliant with various requirements that are given to them by governments and states. Beyond that, we are trying to make Labster an accessible journey overall. So it's not only the simulations, but we're ensuring that the students are independent from the start when they actually find a simulation in our platform through actually playing the simulation with accessibility features in mind, and then revising these materials using supplementary materials that we're providing.
[00:05:04] That all sounds great. I thank you so much for your time.
