The Search That Started Bailey's eLearning Treats

Every instructional designer I know has hit the same wall. You are building a course, you get to the avatar selection stage, and you start searching. You need someone older. Someone with a visible disability. Someone in a wheelchair who looks like they work in an office, not a hospital. A person of color with a mobility aid. You search. You refine. You search again. What you find, if you find anything at all, are the same three images cycling through every stock library on the internet — clinical settings, passive poses, and a demographic range so narrow it would embarrass a 1987 corporate training video. After enough of those searches, most designers do what the deadline demands: they compromise. They grab what is available and move on. I did it too. For years.

The conversation I kept hearing in instructional design communities was not about accessibility — designers understand accessibility. It was about something quieter, but one with a simple solution: the near-total absence of realistic, working, living representations of the people who actually sit in our training. Not the idealized stock photo version of a workforce. The actual one — with the full range of ages, body compositions, ethnicities, gender identities, visible disabilities, personal expressions, and human variety that shows up in any real organization on any given day. I believed in that principle. I talked about it. I just had not held myself accountable to it. I had diverse avatars in my own work, but they were not necessarily representative of my actual audience. There is a difference between diverse and representative, and for a long time I let myself believe checking one box meant checking both.

That is when I stopped talking about the problem and started building the solution. I needed a place to go to find avatars that genuinely reflected the people sitting in the training — and when that place did not exist, I built it. That is what Bailey's eLearning Treats is. Not a stock photo library with a diversity filter applied as an afterthought. A catalog built gap-first — meaning the gaps in existing resources drove every character decision from the beginning. Who is missing? Who does the industry consistently fail to represent? Who does the instructional designer searching at 4pm before a deadline never find? Those are the characters I build. The catalog targets age range deliberately — not just the 28-year-old professional default, but characters across the full working lifespan. It targets body composition, personal appearance, and visible self-expression — tattoos, colored hair, the human variety that stock libraries still treat as edge cases. And it targets disability representation with specific intent, because this is where the gap is most severe and most consequential. Wheelchair users who are active professionals. Amputees. Characters with service animals. People whose visible difference is part of who they are, not the entire story the image is trying to tell.

The library comes in both photo-realistic and illustrated styles, because different courses, different organizations, and different design aesthetics call for different approaches. Both styles are built to the same standard: characters specific enough to feel real, diverse enough to reflect the actual workforce, and consistent enough across poses and expressions to carry a full course. A designer should be able to open Bailey's and find someone who looks like their learner — not approximate it, not settle for close enough, but actually find them. That is the benchmark every character in the catalog is built against.

The instructional design community talks constantly about putting the learner at the center. Representation is the most immediate, most visible, most concrete expression of that principle — and it starts before the first learning objective, before the first interaction, before the first word of content. It starts with who the learner sees on screen. I needed to hold myself accountable to that truth and be the change I was advocating. That accountability did not require a manifesto. It required building something. And I did.

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