Digital Accessibility in Practice
Signature Course No. 416 — A Signature AI Socratic Coaching Course.
No experience needed — your coach starts where you are.
A New Kind of Learning
Socratic coaching, delivered by an agentic AI coach.
Not a course you watch. An AI coach you work with.
The Lighthouse Coach begins by discovering how you think about the subject, teaches what is missing, and gives you realistic practice before asking you to prove that you can use it. You may test out of concepts you already understand, while capstones turn the learning into a practical plan, decision, conversation, or other real-world result.
The curriculum is deliberately authored; the AI delivers it through coaching. It is not an AI randomly generating lessons.
A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing
The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's Digital Accessibility in Practice course, in the Risk, Safety & Compliance category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.
Conformance, not opinion — and a claim is only as wide as its evidence. A resident who cannot complete a benefits application because the error message is announced to no one, a blind employee who cannot read the council packet because it is a scanned picture of a document, a deaf parent who cannot follow the school board video because the captions end at minute twelve — none of these people met a design opinion. Each of them met a barrier that a published success criterion already names. This course teaches the discipline that finds those barriers before the public does, proves them with evidence, fixes them in the right order and at the right layer, and keeps them fixed.
It starts with conformance. The standard is external and published, the requirements are testable, results are recorded as findings rather than impressions, and the claim at the end is bounded to what was tested, at the level tested, by the method used, on the date tested. You will learn to read a criterion the way an auditor reads it: what it requires, what it does not require, and what evidence settles the question — and to ask, of every claim you meet, what exactly is being claimed, against which criterion, on what evidence.
It works in two movements. First, Module 1 — The Standard and the Audit — work through Concepts 1–9, finishing with The Audit You Can Defend; then, Module 2 — Remediation, Accessible Content, and a Program That Lasts — work through Concepts 10–18, finishing with The Plan That Survives the Redesign.
Both capstones produce real artifacts — a conformance audit of Briarport Public Services' resident portal that you could hand to its director and defend line by line: charter, sample, and method stated first, the three kinds of checking run on real evidence, and a seven-element findings register with an honest, bounded conclusion; and a remediation and program plan for the same organization — sequenced by user impact, repaired at the right layer, bought on evidence, and built to survive its next redesign.
The honesty standard is part of the course. This is a practice course, not a certification-readiness course: it prepares you to do accessibility work to a defensible standard, and no completion of it certifies any website, application, document, or organization as conformant. The law is stated at structure level — which statute and rule point at which technical standard, for which organizations, on what published schedule — so you can hold an informed conversation with counsel; it is information, not legal advice, and dates and thresholds are flagged in the book for verification against the current source.
The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.
Digital Accessibility in Practice is part of The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person learning Cognosco Learning has delivered since 2002.
Course Facts
One full concept, coached end to end — free: verify your email and we’ll send you a link to start.
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Diagnose → Learn & Practice → Prove → Capstone
Every learner moves through the same discipline a Cognosco instructor would insist on in the room.
Diagnose
The Coach starts where the course starts: with the claim. When someone last called a page or product “accessible,” say what they meant and whether they could name the standard, version, and level behind the word; name which of your current public claims you could defend tomorrow, with test evidence, if a complainant asked you to; and say where opinion currently settles accessibility arguments in your organization — by seniority, by designer preference, by vendor assurance — instead of by the text of a criterion. Every concept opens with three questions that locate where you actually stand, and your answers shape how deeply the Coach works the concept with you. Everyone begins with Module 1 — no skipping the foundations you only think you have.
Learn & Practice
Work each concept in conversation with the Coach — spoken or written — then practice it against realistic situations until it holds up.
Prove
Every concept ends in proof: answer the check cold and demonstrate the skill. Know it already? Test out and take credit immediately.
Capstone
Finish with two capstones — The Audit You Can Defend for Module 1 and The Plan That Survives the Redesign for Module 2 — that pull the whole course together, and earn the certificate.
What You'll Learn
Claim, criterion, evidence — in that order, every time. Every skill in this course is the same discipline at a different depth: name what is being claimed, open the criterion that governs it, and let the evidence — never seniority, appearance, or a vendor's assurance — settle the question.
Module 1 builds the auditor. Conformance, Not Opinion; The WCAG Model; Perceivable in Practice; Operable in Practice; Understandable and Robust; Which Rule Points Where; Scoping an Audit Honestly; Three Kinds of Checking; and A Finding Someone Can Act On — the standard learned whole, then the audit craft: honest scope, three kinds of checking with their limits stated, and findings a developer can act on and a second auditor can re-test.
Module 2 makes it last. Priority by User Impact; Fix at the Right Layer; Accessible Documents; Multimedia Done Right; Forms, Errors, and Transactions; Buying Accessible; Accessible Content in Daily Work; Building the Program; and Keeping Conformance Alive — remediation sequenced by the people it restores, documents and media made accessible as routine production, procurement graded like evidence, and the policy, roles, and gates that stop a redesign from quietly reintroducing every barrier just removed.
And it holds its boundary throughout. User experience design craft — how to make an interface clear, attractive, and easy to use — is taught in its own neighboring course. This course is the conformance discipline beside it: work against a published technical standard, tested with evidence, claimed only as widely as the evidence reaches. It states the law at structure level and practices no one's law for them.
What you will learn
- Read and apply the WCAG model — principles, guidelines, success criteria, and conformance levels — and state what a conformance claim actually requires
- Apply the Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust criteria to real pages and components, naming the criterion that governs each barrier
- State, at structure level, how Section 508 and the ADA Title II rule each adopt WCAG, for whom, and on what published schedule — and where to verify the current text
- Plan and run a conformance audit that combines automated, manual, and assistive-technology checks, and state what each method cannot catch
- Write findings a developer can act on and an auditor can re-test: barrier, criterion, evidence, and user impact
- Prioritize remediation by user impact and fix at the layer — design system, template, content, or code — where one repair clears the most barriers
- Make documents and multimedia accessible: structure, reading order, captions, transcripts, and audio description judged against the criteria
- Evaluate procurement claims and accessibility conformance reports, and build the program — policy, roles, checks, and feedback handling — that keeps conformance alive through change
Everything in the course
- All 18 concepts of Digital Accessibility in Practice, in 2 modules
- A starting-point check first — the Coach finds where you actually stand before teaching
- Learn, Practice, Prove for every concept — no passive video watching
- A test-out on every concept: prove you know it and move on
- The Voice Coach: talk with the Coach out loud — it speaks, listens, and replies
- A personal Learner Record of your work across the course
- Two capstone exercises: The Audit You Can Defend and The Plan That Survives the Redesign
- A printable session summary whenever you pause
- The Lighthouse Coach completion certificate (Signature Series)
- Your progress is saved as you go — stop anytime, resume where you left off
Built for the people answerable for conformance
Accessibility practitioners and coordinators — the people named responsible for conformance in a public agency, university, health system, or company, who must run audits and defend findings; and developers, designers, and content authors who build and publish the pages, components, documents, and media that conformance is judged on, and who need to know which criterion governs the thing in front of them.
Procurement and vendor managers — who buy digital products and services and must evaluate accessibility claims before a contract is signed, not after a complaint arrives; and managers and program leads who own budgets, schedules, and priorities, and must turn an audit report into a funded, sequenced plan rather than a shelf document.
Compliance, legal-support, and communications staff — who field accessibility statements, feedback, and complaints, and need the structure of the rules stated correctly without practicing law they are not licensed to practice. This course assumes general fluency with the web as a user and basic familiarity with how websites are built and published; it assumes no prior accessibility specialty and no law degree. The standard itself is taught here, from the ground up.
Prefer to learn live and in person? The same material anchors Cognosco's one-day programs — browse the in-person catalog.
Start with Conformance, Not Opinion
$195 — introductory price. One payment. No subscription, no password to manage.
Here is exactly what happens when you enroll:
- Pay securely with Stripe — you are taken straight into the course
- Create your learner profile and begin the Module 1 starting-point check
- Save the access key you are given — it restores your enrollment on any device
- Learn at your pace; your progress is stored in your browser on your device
For the full voice experience, use Chrome and allow the microphone when asked. Typing your answers works everywhere, all the time. Questions before you enroll? Email hello@cognoscolearning.com.
Before you enroll
What is a Socratic coaching session?
A conversation, not a video. Your coach asks a question; you answer — out loud by voice, or by typing — and the coach responds to what you said: naming the misconception it hears, affirming what you got right, and asking the next question. You advance only when you have mastered each concept, so a finished course means the learning held.
How long does it take — and how long do I have?
About 30 minutes per concept. Learn in sittings of any length; your progress is saved as you go. You have a full year from purchase to finish, and you can revisit and retake within that year.
What does the certificate verify?
That you completed every concept and both capstones of this course. Anyone can confirm a Cognosco certificate online — enter its certificate ID on our verification page.
What if it isn't for me — what are the refunds?
If you have not started, cancel for a full refund within seven days of purchase. Once you have started, there is no cash refund — stop before finishing and we credit the full amount you paid toward any other course in the library (credit valid one year from your original purchase). Once you complete the course, no refund or credit applies.
More Signature Courses are coming
Digital Accessibility in Practice is Signature Course No. 416. Leave your email and we'll send you news of future Signature Courses and Lighthouse updates as they are announced — nothing else.