Here at The Idea Place, I don’t sell products but rather ideas and information. Better yet, the ideas are free for the taking and available anytime. This year, I’ll climb on the Black Friday deal train and offer a few free bonus ideas for your holiday accessibility pleasure.
Promote the Future, Along with the Past
Accessibility conferences, key dates on the annual calendar of accessibility happenings and more are filled with announcements of this or that helpful offering in the accessibility world. This is great and well appreciated. What’s often missing though is any talk of the future and to be clear, explicit commitments and benchmarks to track developments. Yet this is often what customers really want to know.
It is great to promote what you’ve done but for users waiting on accessibility improvements in a web site, application or other experience, knowing when they can expect such to be delivered is perhaps the most empowering thing you can do short of actually making the area accessible. With such information, users can make plans, understand how long they need to use workarounds or otherwise deal with the accessibility gaps. Without such information, hope becomes the only thing available and frankly, hope is not a plan.
Know Your Accessibility
If you are speaking to an audience of any size, whether it is in the accessibility arena or not, know the accessibility of the technology you are speaking about whether it is the focus of your talk or not. The disappointment of hearing about some new experience, only to try it and find it lacks the most basic accessibility, leaves a lasting negative far beyond what you realize. It is better to know the accessibility expectations before you try.
Respectfully point out any known gaps, along with expected dates for correction, out early on. Letting the bad news dribble in for weeks and months serves no positive purpose.
I’ve made a career of working in accessibility but it is only part of what interests me about technology. In many cases you have no idea who is in your audience and what accessibility tools, settings and such they are using. At best you maybe know they want to use whatever it is you are sharing.
Support Accessible Employment
It is great to see companies embracing the concepts of inclusive hiring and starting to actively recruit people from different communities. But opening the doors of employment and having people come through them is really step zero. From benefit programs, workplace tools, attitudes of colleagues and so much more, it is key you actively assess and eliminate barriers. Unless you hired the employee to do this, any barriers they encounter and have to resolve for themselves, take away from the main reasons you hired them. It is not a good place to be, having to struggle to get the task you are hired to do completed and work to make the experience accessible at the same time.
Speaking of accessibility in the workplace, if you don’t know the end-to-end accessibility of your employment experience, it is a good idea to hire someone to assess it and help drive for improvement on a regular basis. There are many benefits to taking a comprehensive approach in areas such as this. It allows for more tracking and accountability, gives employees experiencing accessibility issues a place to report them and get consistent updates and so much more.
Have a Plan
Some aspects of accessibility are simple and require little effort. Others are complicated and have multiple steps needed for success. The best way to ensure you achieve any goals in this space is to have a plan. A good plan will at minimum outline your objectives, owners and expectations for each part of the plan, benchmarks to track progress, clear communication of the plan and the flexibility to adapt to changing conditions. Mysteries make for fun reading but not for what’s going on with accessibility.
Be Adaptable
Accessibility, like pretty much any aspect of technology, is under a constant state of change. This is true not just for the how of making something accessible, but also the expectations of what’s possible in accessibility. You need to be adaptable to that reality. Embrace learning, monitor what’s happening and adapt. There was a time when the prevailing expectation by some was that a flat screen using just touch on a device wouldn’t be usable for example by people who are blind. That expectation was shattered years ago and today any device missing this basic accessibility would be considered simply unacceptable.
Involve Users in Meaningful Ways
There is no better source of both what’s needed and how it should work then the populations using technology. Find ways to involve your customers. Sometimes that means you need to be creative. For example, if all you have are designs and wire frames, you might have to find ways to properly describe those items to users who do not see. Having personally been involved in such processes multiple times, I can tell you once everyone involved embraces this reality, it is amazing the learning that happens.
Try It, You’ll Probably Like It
The ideas here are just a few to spark your thinking. Some might be right for your organization, some might make little sense. The key is to try something and hopefully a few of these ideas. Learn what works and do more of it. Learn what doesn’t work and try something else. Accessibility is an ongoing process and that is just great.
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