Making Accessibility Part of Your Content Workflow
IDEA: A commitment to inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility
If you work in a mission-driven organization, no doubt you’ve heard about commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion. How do you make outreach that is natively inclusive because it is accessible?
“Accessibility focuses on how a disabled person accesses or benefits from a site, system or application. Accessibility is an important part of designing and should be considered throughout the development process.”
Many organizations test their website for accessibility after the design and development are complete. While a noble step, doing so after the design is decided on can create problems that are harder to fix if discovered later in the process.
- Are your brand colors lacking the necessary contrast that helps a person with vision issues read better?
- Are your downloadable reports or data visualizations built with accessibility in mind? While your organization might check the “passing” box for website accessibility, is your email marketing and social media content also accessible to people with disabilities?
- Can content contributors within your organization who may face vision or hearing impairments contribute similarly to anyone else, or are there barriers to inclusion that need to be dealt with?
Whatever your answer is, chances are that your content workflows can build in more accessibility practices. Creating engaging content is one thing—ensuring that content is something your target audience finds accessible is another thing entirely. So, how do you make accessibility part of your content workflow?
“Build benevolent, kind, accessible and trustworthy systems.”
—Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the worldwide web.
There are 2.2 billion people in the world today with disabilities.
- Are you building in time for your content teams to learn about – and do the work necessary to make accessible content?
- 60% of all accessibility issues are introduced at the design stage – Are there improvements and small changes you can make to your organization’s design, marketing and outreach processes to make the output more accessible?
- Are your advertising channels and formats helpful or intrusive hindrances to people with disabilities?
- Can your staff use the existing outreach management platforms you’ve invested in more effectively if they navigate a disability? Could you?
Should a commitment to accessibility with your brand message and storytelling be one of the non-performative steps your organization can take?
This article explains why all progressive organizations should commit to improvements, where to start, and how to get needed executive buy-in on the effort.
- Learn about tactics organizations such as NASA employ to increase accessibility in practice.
- Review additional free resources available that can help usher in positive change.
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This blog post is a summary of a more in depth article. Complete this form to download that article.
