Revised with new information as of August 3, 2020

A free resource for nonprofit organizations, NGOs, civil society organizations,
charities, schools, public sector agencies & other mission-based agencies
by Jayne Cravens
via coyotecommunications.com & coyoteboard.com (same web site)

 

How Volunteers Can QUICKLY Help Your Program
To Be More Accessible Online


Web sites and other online resources that are not designed to be accessible for people with disabilities lock out potential customers, clients, employees, volunteers, donors and other supporters. People with disabilities in the USA comprise more than 19 percent of the people living in the country, an even larger percentage than Hispanics and Latinos, who are the largest ethnic, racial or cultural minority group in the USA, making up 15 percent of the population. Can any nonprofit, non-governmental organization (NGO), civil society organization, charity or other mission-based organization really afford to leave out anyone, including such a large segment of our society?

Plus, creating accommodations online for volunteers with disabilities ends up making the online experience better for EVERYONE. Don't be surprised when an online ends up being something many other people value. For instance, by captioning all of your videos, you make them more appealing to people who want to experience the information but are in a public space and don't have earphones and don't want to disturb people around them. Captioning also helps people who aren't native speakers of the language the video is in.

But most nonprofits and other mission-based organizations can never afford to pay a professional web designer or developer, and most funders refuse to fund overhead, or have strict requirements regarding the funding of such, and that means creating a fully accessible web site and other online tools is out of reach for these programs.

That does NOT, however, mean that the battle is completely lost: if your organization involves volunteers, you can mobilize those volunteers to help in making your web site and other online materials more accessible, even if they don't have the expertise to make it fully accessible. In fact, most of these tasks can be done by volunteers who have NO WEB DESIGN EXPERIENCE - volunteers (and employees!) can be taught how to do these tasks in just a few minutes by someone who does understand web markup language.

Volunteers can:

This page from the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) offers simple steps with detailed guidance so that you can get an idea whether or not accessibility is addressed in even the most basic way on a web page - it's an excellent guide for volunteers at a web site accessibility fix-a-thon.

For web sites that use CSS, consider this tweet from accessibility expert Denis Boudreau:

I'm not a web designer so I really don't entirely know what Denis is talking about, but if he says it's "that simple" then, for someone who knows what CSS is, it really will be "that simple."

Note that many of these tasks could be done by online volunteers. Or, you could host a One Day Accessibility Fix-A-Thon of Volunteers, where you ask them to bring their laptops, you provide some snacks or even a full meal, and they sit around your conference room table and concentrate on these tasks for a half or full day. Volunteers find these kinds of hackathons VERY appealing!

Have more ideas on how volunteers can help a nonprofit, school or other mission-based organization be more accessible online? Please send your suggestion to me.

And if you want to encourage your web manager, whoever that person is, part-time, full-time, volunteer, whatever, to know more about accessibility: the government of the State of Illinois provides Implementation Guidelines for Web-Based Information and Applications (formerly Illinois Web Accessibility Standards) and, as a non-web site designer, I find it easier to understand than most other guidelines out there. These guidelines are good to ask your web site designer and manager - no matter that person's web design skill level, to follow. These guidelines from the state of Illinois also provide links to resources from other organizations:

And if your nonprofit relies on video to deliver its message, your staff should review Making Accessible Media: Accessible Design in Digital Media, a fully accessible FREE open access online course, offered in both French and English, from Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Canada. It focuses on the representation of disability in media, video captioning, audio transcription, described video and live captioning for broadcast, alternative text for image description and tutorials on how to make accessible documents and presentations. While this course offers practical insight into how to make media accessible in the final stages of production, it also reminds that accessibility should not be an afterthought but part of the initial development process. One of the mandates of this course is to raise awareness of the systemic, attitudinal, physical, information and technological barriers that interrupt accessibility in current media practices.

Also see:

 
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