Instructor Guide

1. About this guide

This guide is for anyone facilitating this course for a blind or low vision learner, or for a group of learners. That could mean a job-training program instructor running a weekly class, a vocational rehabilitation counselor supporting one client through the material one-on-one, a workshop leader delivering select weeks to a group, or a learner who is working through the course independently and wants a facilitator's view of how the pieces fit together. Wherever you sit in that list, this guide is written to you directly, in the same plain language style as the rest of the course.

This guide is not a week. It contains no lesson, no exercises, no portfolio project, and no test. It sits alongside the course's other two reference documents and does a different job than either of them. The syllabus (syllabus.html) is the learner-facing map of all 24 weeks, written for the person taking the course. Each of the 24 week files (week-01.html through week-24.html) is a complete, self-contained lesson with everything a learner needs for that week. This guide is written for the person running the course, not taking it. It explains what is inside those files before you open them, how to pace the weeks, what accessibility standard the whole course was built to, why certain interface details are deliberately left out, and how to support a blind or low vision adult learner well through 24 weeks of technical material.

Read this guide once, in full, before your first session. After that, treat it as a reference: return to the sections you need as you plan your term, review the week-by-week table before you build a term calendar, and check the accessibility checklist any time you create your own supplementary handout or slide for this course.

2. Course structure

The course covers 24 weeks. Every week is a complete, self-contained file: it does not assume you have read any other specific week, and it does not point forward or backward to a week by number. This means you can hand a learner any single week's file and they will have everything they need for that week's material in front of them. At the same time, the weeks are still sequenced deliberately, moving from foundational understanding and hands-on tool mastery, through prompting and automation, into professional communication, and finally into a family of marketing and content careers, ending with a capstone project. The description below groups the weeks by theme purely to help you plan; the files themselves carry no phase or unit labels.

Weeks 1 through 5: Foundations and major tools. Learners build an honest, balanced understanding of what AI actually is and is not, then get real, hands-on, screen-reader-tested experience with the major AI tools available today: Claude, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Microsoft's Copilot features alongside a first tour of VS Code, a free code editor with AI features.

Weeks 6 through 8: Career paths and employer-valued skills. Learners explore customer service and technical support as career paths, including income research, work-from-home opportunities, AI phone and helpdesk tools, and the opportunity to help local businesses set up AI systems of their own, then step back to look at which AI skills employers are hiring for right now and start a resume roadmap.

Weeks 9 through 13: Prompting and automation. Learners move from using AI tools to communicating with them precisely: writing clear prompts, requesting accessible output formats, using system prompts and chain-of-thought techniques, working directly with the plain-text file formats (Markdown, JSON, and Python) that power most AI workflows, writing durable personal instruction sets, and building a first simple automated agent.

Weeks 14 through 17: Professional communication. Learners turn their tool and prompting skills toward professional writing: reports, proposals, and resumes; producing genuinely accessible Word, PDF, and HTML output; professional email; and a complete, tailored AI-powered job search.

Weeks 18 through 23: Marketing and content careers. Learners apply the same disciplined, fact-checked, audience-aware writing habits to a family of communication careers: public relations, marketing fundamentals, social media, advertising, copywriting, and content creation and curation.

Week 24: Capstone. The single closing week. Learners combine skills built across the course into one capstone project and complete a 50-question comprehensive final test drawn from material throughout the course.

The seven-part structure of every week file

Every one of the 24 week files follows the same seven-part structure, in the same order. Knowing this structure before you open a file means you always know where to find what you need.

1. Learning objectives. Several plain-language statements of what the learner will be able to do by the end of the week. Use these to preview a session or to check a learner's progress afterward.
2. Lesson. The main teaching content, written at about an eighth-grade reading level, broken into several headed subsections plus a closing list of key terms. Each week's lesson is fully self-contained and does not require having read any other week.
3. Keyboard-only exercises. Step-by-step, hands-on exercises with clear keyboard instructions, written to describe what each action accomplishes so they work no matter which screen reader a learner uses.
4. Portfolio project. One hands-on project the learner completes and keeps. Every week's project has its own name (for example, "My AI Foundations Portfolio" in Week 1) and together they form the learner's growing portfolio, described further in Section 9 below.
5. Weekly test. Exactly 50 questions: 30 multiple choice, 15 true or false, and 5 short answer, in one accessible form.
6. Answer key. A complete answer key with a one-sentence explanation for every question, described further in Section 7 below.

Because every file follows this same shape, you can open any week for the first time and immediately know how to navigate it: jump straight to the objectives to preview it, jump to the exercises to prepare materials, or jump to the test and answer key to prepare for review.

3. Suggested pacing

The course is built around one week of material per weekly session. A realistic session runs roughly 60 to 90 minutes: enough time to review objectives, work through the lesson (either read aloud together, read independently with a screen reader before the session, or worked through jointly), complete the keyboard exercises, make progress on the portfolio project, and take the test.

Not every week fits comfortably into one sitting, and that is expected rather than a sign something has gone wrong. Some weeks are more technically dense than others and benefit from being split across two shorter sessions. In particular, plan extra time around Week 5 (Microsoft Office Copilot and VS Code), where learners are often handling new and less familiar interfaces for the first time, around Weeks 6 and 7 (customer service and technical support), which involve more independent research than earlier weeks, and around Week 11 (working with Markdown, JSON, and Python files), which introduces several new plain-text syntaxes in one week. If a learner is showing fatigue or the exercises are taking noticeably longer than expected, splitting a week across two sessions—lesson and exercises in one session, project and test in the next—is a reasonable and recommended adjustment, not a deviation from the course.

What is not recommended is skipping weeks outright. Even though each week's file is self-contained and does not require any specific earlier week by name, the course was still designed and sequenced so that the skills build in a sensible order: tool fluency before prompting discipline, prompting discipline before professional writing, professional writing before the marketing and content careers material. Skipping around, or compressing several weeks into one session to catch up on a schedule, risks a learner reaching later material without the practiced habits it assumes. If a term calendar is tight, it is better to plan fewer total weeks of instruction time and let the course run longer in real time than to compress its content.

4. The accessibility standard this course is built on

Every file in this course, including this guide, was built to a single, non-negotiable accessibility standard. Understanding this standard matters for two reasons: it explains why the files are structured the way they are, and it is the bar you should hold any supplementary handout, slide, or exercise you create for this course to as well.

The standard has eight parts:

• Semantic HTML5 landmarks. Every page uses real header, nav, main, and footer elements, not visually-styled generic containers. A screen reader user can jump directly between these landmarks instead of reading the whole page in order every time.
• A skip link as the first focusable element. The very first thing a keyboard or screen reader user reaches on any page is a link that jumps straight past the header and navigation into the main content, so returning to a long page does not mean tabbing through the same navigation list every single time.
• One heading level one per page, with a logical heading order. Every page has exactly one h1, and every heading level below it steps down one level at a time with nothing skipped—never jumping from a level-two heading straight to a level-four heading. This lets a screen reader user navigate a page's whole structure by heading alone and trust that the structure they hear matches the actual organization of the content.
• Scoped table headers. Every data table has a caption describing what it contains, and every header cell is explicitly scoped to its column or its row (scope="col" or scope="row"). Without this, a screen reader reads a table as a stream of disconnected cells with no way to know which header a given value belongs to.
• Full keyboard operability with visible focus styles. Every interactive element on every page can be reached and operated using the keyboard alone, and every element shows a clearly visible focus outline when it has focus, which also benefits low vision users tracking their position on screen visually.
• Plain language at roughly an eighth-grade reading level. Short sentences, and every technical term defined the first time it appears. This is not a simplification for its own sake; dense, jargon-heavy writing adds real cognitive load on top of the effort of listening to synthesized speech, especially across a 24-week course covering genuinely technical material.
• No information conveyed by color alone. Nothing in this course relies on a learner being able to see a color to understand it. Any distinction that might otherwise be shown with color alone is also stated in text.
• Fieldset and legend groupings on every test form. Every test question is wrapped in a fieldset with a legend stating the question, and every input has a properly associated label, so a screen reader announces the question text together with each answer option rather than a bare, unlabeled radio button.

This standard exists specifically because this course's audience is blind and low vision adults who rely on screen readers as their primary way of accessing every page. A course teaching digital and AI skills that was not itself fully accessible would undermine its own purpose before the first lesson even started. If you create any additional handout, slide deck, or practice exercise to use alongside this course, hold it to this same eight-part standard—Section 11 below gives you a short, practical checklist for doing exactly that.

5. A note on the "interfaces change" honesty rule

Starting in Week 2, and continuing through every remaining week of the course, this material deliberately avoids stating exact current menu paths, button labels, or screen-reader-specific keystrokes for any software whose interface changes over time. That list includes Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Microsoft Office and Copilot, VS Code, Word and PDF accessibility checkers, Gmail, Outlook, social media platforms, and ad platforms.

Instead, from Week 2 onward, the course teaches durable exploration methods that keep working no matter how a given interface changes or which screen reader a learner uses: a screen reader's list of links or interactive elements, sometimes called an elements list, for jumping straight to a page's headings, links, form fields, or tables; general heading and landmark navigation; Say All or a screen reader's continuous reading command; and the habit of checking a tool's own current help screen or shortcuts list rather than trusting a fixed, possibly outdated set of instructions someone else wrote down. Because different learners use different screen readers, the course intentionally does not name one product's exact keystroke as universal; it describes what each action accomplishes and reminds the learner to check their own screen reader's documentation for the exact keys. A small number of genuinely stable, non-screen-reader application conventions are treated as exceptions and stated directly—for example, VS Code's Command Palette shortcut, Ctrl+Shift+P (or Cmd+Shift+P on a Mac)—because these are keystrokes built into the application itself, not into any particular screen reader, and have remained unchanged for many years.

It is important that you, as the instructor, understand this is a deliberate design choice, not a gap or an oversight in the material. A course that confidently stated "the button is in the top right corner" or "press this exact screen reader key combination" for a commercial AI product would very likely be wrong within a year, or wrong for any learner using a different screen reader than the one assumed. Teaching the exploration method instead means the course stays useful long after any one interface changes, and useful to every learner regardless of which screen reader they use.

You are welcome, and encouraged, to supplement any week with current, specific interface details you have personally verified yourself, at the moment you are teaching that week. If you do, treat that supplement as exactly that: something you checked today, not a permanent fact to keep reusing next term without re-checking. Re-verify any specific detail you add periodically, especially before reusing it in a future session, since the tools this course discusses will keep changing even though the course's own teaching material, built around durable methods rather than fixed facts, will not go stale in the same way.

6. Teaching notes

The notes below flag common sticking points, the background knowledge different stretches of the course assume, and what is worth double-checking before you begin teaching it.

Weeks 1 through 5: Foundations and major tools

This stretch assumes no prior AI experience at all, but it does assume a learner is already comfortable with basic screen reader use and basic web browsing, since Week 1 references real websites and everyday digital tools. The most common sticking point here is not technical difficulty but mindset: some learners arrive skeptical or anxious about AI, and others arrive with unrealistic expectations from hype they have encountered elsewhere. Week 1 is written to address both directly, so resist the urge to rush past it even if a learner already uses an AI tool casually; the honest, balanced framing it sets up is load-bearing for the rest of the course. Before Week 2 begins, confirm each learner already has, or can quickly create, an account with at least one of Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini, since Weeks 2 through 4 are hands-on with each tool in turn. Waiting until the middle of a session to discover a learner has no account and needs help through a sign-up and verification flow will cost real session time. Week 5 is the most technically dense week of this stretch and the most likely to need a split session, as noted in Section 3.

Weeks 6 through 8: Career paths and employer-valued skills

These weeks involve more independent research than earlier weeks, since learners are asked to look into real pay ranges, job postings, and legitimate remote opportunities in their area. Some learners will need more support here distinguishing a legitimate work-from-home opportunity from a scam; the lessons cover common red flags, but real-world browsing during the exercises may turn up ambiguous cases worth discussing directly.

Weeks 9 through 13: Prompting and automation

This stretch assumes comfort with at least one AI chat tool from the earlier weeks; it does not require mastery of all of them. The most common sticking point is Week 11, where three new plain-text syntaxes (Markdown, JSON, and Python) arrive in one week—budget extra time here and consider the two-session split. Week 13's introduction to agents is conceptually the most abstract material in the course so far; learners with limited prior exposure to the idea of a program doing multiple steps on its own may need the read-decide-act-check loop explained more than once, with concrete everyday examples before returning to the AI-specific ones.

Weeks 14 through 17: Professional communication

This stretch assumes the prompting vocabulary from Weeks 9 through 13 (context, examples, role assignment, iteration, and so on) as working knowledge a learner can apply without re-teaching it from scratch. It also assumes each learner has some real or realistic professional documents or job goals to draft toward; if a learner is not currently job searching, help them choose a plausible target role or organization before Week 14 begins so the exercises have something concrete to work with. The most common sticking point in this stretch is emotional rather than technical: Week 17's job search work, including the disclosure decision the lesson deliberately presents without a single "right answer," can surface real anxiety or past negative experiences for some learners. Give that week's discussion room rather than rushing to the exercises.

Weeks 18 through 23: Marketing and content careers

This stretch assumes comfort with the professional writing and editing habits built in Weeks 14 through 17, particularly the technique for catching generic "AI voice" that every week in this stretch reuses and builds on. Before Week 18 begins, it helps to have each learner settle on one organization, real or fictional, to use consistently across this whole stretch, since a press release, a marketing plan, social content, an ad concept, and landing page copy land with much more coherence when they all describe the same organization rather than a different invented one each week. The most common sticking point is scope creep in the portfolio projects: because this stretch covers several adjacent creative disciplines back to back, some learners try to make each week's project more elaborate than the lesson asks for. Encourage finishing each week's project at the size the exercise actually specifies; there will be time to expand favorite pieces later, and an unfinished, overly ambitious project is a worse portfolio outcome than a complete, modest one.

Week 24: Capstone

Before Week 24 begins, review the learner's portfolio pieces from Weeks 14 through 23 directly, since the capstone project draws on the skills they represent: the tailored resume and cover letter approach, the accessible document export skills, the marketing plan shape, the alt-text technique, and either the press release structure or the copywriting structure. If any of these skills feels shaky, address it before Week 24 rather than during it; the capstone week itself is not built to re-teach earlier material in depth. Because Week 24 is both the heaviest single project in the course and a comprehensive 50-question final test, plan for it to take longer than an ordinary week, and consider treating it as two full sessions: one for planning and building the capstone deliverables, and a separate one for the final test and closing reflection.

7. Using the weekly tests and answer keys

Every week, including the Week 24 capstone week, ends with a test of exactly 50 questions in one accessible form: 30 multiple choice questions with four options each, 15 true or false questions, and 5 short answer questions where the learner types a brief answer in their own words. Every question is answerable from that week's own lesson, and none depends on an image, a color, or a visual layout to answer correctly. A score of 75 percent—38 out of 50—is a pass. Week 24's test is a comprehensive final, not a normal weekly test: its questions draw on material from throughout the course rather than from Week 24 alone, so a learner who has kept up with the course but is rusty on early material may want a light review of Weeks 1 through 5 before sitting it.

Every test comes with a complete answer key, and every answer in that key includes a one-sentence explanation of why that answer is correct. The most useful way to use these answer keys is not only as a grading tool. When a learner misses a question, read that question's one-sentence explanation together, out loud, as a short, targeted re-teaching moment rather than simply marking the item wrong and moving on. Because every explanation names the specific concept or example the question was testing, this turns test review into a genuine second pass at the material, often more efficient than re-reading the whole original lesson section. For short answer questions in particular, where a learner's own wording will rarely match a model answer exactly, use the explanation to judge whether the learner's answer captured the same underlying idea, rather than requiring an exact match to specific wording.

8. Supporting blind and low vision adult learners

The guidance below is general and applies across every week of the course.

Screen reader setups vary widely between learners. Two learners using the same screen reader may be running different versions, different verbosity settings, and very different personal navigation habits built up over years of individual use, and other learners will be using an entirely different screen reader altogether. Do not assume a shared baseline going in. Budget real time in your first session or two for a learner to show you, or tell you, how they navigate day to day, and expect some early troubleshooting as you learn each learner's setup rather than treating that troubleshooting as a delay from the "real" material.

Encourage independent exploration over constant narration. When a learner is working through an interface, especially during the elements-list and heading-navigation exercises this course teaches from Week 2 onward, resist the instinct to describe every element or narrate every click for them. Part of what this course is building is the confidence and the habit to explore an unfamiliar screen independently; over-narrating short-circuits exactly that skill. Offer a hint or a nudge when a learner is genuinely stuck, but give them the chance to find things themselves first.

Be mindful of cognitive load, and allow real breaks. This course covers genuinely technical material—JSON syntax, prompt engineering, agent concepts—on top of the sustained effort of following synthesized or braille speech output for 60 to 90 minutes at a stretch. That is real cognitive work. Build in short breaks during longer sessions, and do not treat a learner asking to pause or slow down as a sign the material is too hard for them; it is often simply a sign the pace needs adjusting.

Treat the learner as the expert on their own access needs. A learner's own account of what works for them—a particular verbosity setting, a preference for braille output over speech, a specific pace of navigation—should be taken as authoritative. Your role is to teach the course content and adapt your facilitation to the learner, not to correct how they use their own assistive technology.

9. Portfolio and capstone guidance

Every week's hands-on project is designed to be kept, not discarded after grading. Across 24 weeks, these projects build into one ongoing portfolio a learner can point to as real, demonstrated skill. Weeks 14 through 23 in particular produce pieces with direct professional value: an AI-drafted professional document and its accessible export, a set of email templates, a tailored job application, a press release, a marketing plan, a social media content set, an ad campaign concept, landing page copy, and a content repurposing plan.

These pieces are not just individually useful; they feed directly into the Week 24 capstone project, "My AI Skills Capstone Project," which draws on the tailoring skills from the job search week, the accessible export skills from the document publishing week, the marketing plan shape, the alt-text technique from the social media week, and either the press release structure or the copywriting structure. A learner arriving at Week 24 with a gap in that portfolio—a missing project, or one left unfinished—will feel that gap directly during the capstone.

For that reason, build two light portfolio check-ins into your term plan rather than waiting until Week 24 to discover a problem. The first, around Week 17, is a natural pause point: the job-search-focused professional-communication material is complete, and it is a good moment to confirm every project from Weeks 1 through 17 is present and saved somewhere the learner can find it again. The second, immediately before Week 24 begins, should specifically confirm the pieces the capstone draws on directly are complete, since the capstone week itself will not stop to re-teach or rebuild them.

11. Supplementary-materials accessibility checklist

Use this short checklist any time you create an additional handout, slide, or exercise to use alongside this course, so anything you add holds to the same standard as the course material itself.

• Semantic headings, in order, with no level skipped.
• Exactly one main heading (one heading level one) per document or page.
• Descriptive link text that makes sense read on its own, not "click here."
• Real table headers, properly scoped, if the material includes any table.
• Tested keyboard-only, from start to finish, with no step that requires a mouse.
• No meaning conveyed by color alone.
• Plain language, at roughly an eighth-grade reading level.