Just getting thoughts out

 The first thing to know about digital accessibility is to know that it’s a practice not a fix. Fixing at the end shows no real intent to be inclusive, yet adopting some simple practices into your everyday digital life and content shows not only intent, but that you care that everyone is included.

In content some basic additions can already make a difference and these are not complex or costly at all. It’s only costly, time consuming and complicated if you bolt on at the end. The worst case scenario for not considering accessibility from the beginning is you have to rewrite or recode entire websites or documents because they are written or created without basics applied. Why on earth would you duplicate work, cost and effort when it could be done properly from the start?

By dismissing basic accessible practices you are already planning to exclude people or discriminate, would you really want to be thought of like that? Would you behave like that if those users were sat in front of you?

The basics of content is simple, some tiny differences that make a big difference take 2-3 minutes to learn, take for example accessible links. This basic skill is relevant to both websites and documents. Imagine if I created a link and named it ‘click here’ can you guess where it takes you before clicking on it, or would it be useful for it to say ‘Learn to enable website’. Links in screen reader technologies are displayed in a list out of context, so naming them is so vital.

Another great example of something simple to consider is the use of colour. If you take the image below turned into black and white, which helps simulate the frustrations of colour blindness, and it’s legend to label what it is you can see that without colour to distinguish what’s what, you have no idea what the segments on the pie chart relate to.

Now take something we all rely on, captions on videos. It is said today that the majority of videos are now viewed using captions, so we can all watch videos on the go, in any context where sound isn’t always possible. This fundamental basic of captions to go with the moving image is so universally relied upon, from a person with hearing impairments to someone in a noisy train.

All of these things are basic and so quick to do when you make content. Naming links, considerations for labelling content, to enabling captions on a video are far from complex, yet all count towards including people. 

If these things are not applied at the point of creation you could spend considerable time rectifying them. How long would it take to write a word for word transcript because you didn’t enable auto captions. How long would it take to recreate images again so they are labelled properly. Or what about recoding and remediating a PDF document so links are titled correctly. All of these would all take considerably more time than doing it right the first time round. Imagine duplicating effort, imagine the time, cost and frustration?

Encouraging people to basic principles of accessibility like these is what I love about Learn to Enable. It can save time, cost and effort and at the same time these important adjustments can help towards making the digital world a more inclusive better place.