To understand learner needs, designers and educators can develop empathy. This workshop offers a first person perspective in diverse instructional formats, fostering deeper understanding of learner experiences. Through demos and simulations, participants grasp how learners engage with content, enhancing their ability to create inclusive instructional materials catering to diverse audiences.

Designing and developing engaging learning experiences to fit the needs of learners, is an important part of the instructional design process. As educators and instructional designers, it is important to identify and understand those needs to be better equipped to create useful and effective instructional materials for all students. A way to gain understanding of these needs is through experience and empathy. Visual, hearing, and physical impairments exist amongst all learning communities and while we can read and learn about how to build accessible content, we gain a deeper understanding of it through first-person interaction with different types of diverse content. When educators and designers understand how different types of content are used, it allows them to design and develop with accessibility in mind. For OnRamps, a dual enrollment initiative at The University of Texas at Austin, one of our focuses is preparing our instructional design and course management teams to create accessible content for OnRamps students. Through experiences and demonstrations such as the ones participants will experience in this workshop, our teams gain a deeper understanding of how students interact with accessible content and have a better idea of what is accessible, what is not, how content can become accessible, and what should be included in our online courses. With this perspective and understanding, educators and designers can work with curriculum and subject matter experts to build accessible content that support engagement, and allow learners to build connections with the content and each other.