Digital Accessibility: 10 Easy Things To Do
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Here are 10 easy ways you can take action to make progress in accessibility and disability inclusion. It's OK not to do it all. The key is progress over perfection. Make progress every day. It's possible you'll go backward. It happens. Dust off and try again.
It took me a bit of time to make things a habit such as alt text, describing myself, saying "This is Meryl speaking." If you forget, fix it and give yourself a little grace. If you see someone forget, educate them and give them grace.
Pick one or two things. Practice them more than once. When you feel like you have them down, pick the next one or two things. Progress over perfection.
- Add image descriptions to images and describe them in context. The key is to be descriptive yet concise. There is no one right way to do it. Just start doing it.
- "This is [your name]" when you speak on a group call. Someone may be listening rather than watching.
- Create a transcript for your most important or next podcast or audio clip. It's important to format the transcript by creating short paragraphs. It's hard to read a big block of text.
- Add accurate plain captions to your most important or next video. Refer to the caption cheat sheet for more on this.
- Offer at least two modern communication options. This applies everywhere. You can require people to fill out the contact field on a form as long as you give them choices (email, phone, text). Websites need to provide two modern contact options. A fax number and snail mail don't count, y'all.
- Capitalize the first letter of each word and abbreviations in hashtags and usernames. It helps to do this for URLs too. But some URLs may be case-sensitive. Test the URL.
- Use a free tool to check color contrast on your content and images. A lot of websites use poor color choices for the background and the text. It adds friction to the reading experience.
- Avoid ALL CAPS in all content because it has no visual shape and feels like yelling. Sentence case is the most readable.
- Add a blank line between paragraphs to improve readability.
- Avoid abusing emojis 👎 like👎 this 👎nightmare. Screenreaders describe the emoji. And It can be hard to read a sentence with emojis showing up in between words.
Posted with permission of Meryl Evans, CPACC (deaf) (She/Her)
