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:
Add titles to all of your web pages
People using screen readers - where the content is read allowed on a
voice - rely on page titles for navigating a site. The added bonus
is that, when you share a URL on a message board, many times the
title on the page will automatically be put in rather than the URL.
Change every "read more" or "click here" link on your website to
something descriptive
People using screen readers - where the content is read allowed on a
voice - often are looking for specific information on a web page,
and may just want to hear the links in order to quickly go to the
page they want. If your site's links all say "read more" or "click
here", it doesn't mean anything. Descriptive links - list of our
board of directors, list of our programs, information about
volunteering, etc. - make a site more accessible.
Make sure every web page has identified the language of the page
This is done in the HTML element, using the lang attribute with a
two-character code value set to the current language of the page
("en" for English, for example)
Add alt text to your photos and other graphics
This is another feature that helps people using screen readers.
Complex images (i.e., charts and graphs) should have descriptive
text near the image (perhaps as a caption). You
don't repeat what might be in a photo caption but, rather,
actually describe the photo: young children smiling broadly at
the camera or about 50 people in the stands of a sports
stadium, shouting a reaction to something on the field or small
puppy playing with a toy, etc. Check out these
recommendations from the State of Illinois
Add labels or titles for all fields on a form
A
form that people use to express interest in
volunteering should have appropriate titles, so if
someone is having the form read to them by a screen
reader, that person can understand it.
Make sure headings are accurate
This is another adjustment that makes a site more accessible for
someone using a screen reader.
Change headlines from HTML that designates text size to HTML
headline designations instead
Instead of the main headline and subheads on the page sized by HTML
(font size=5, for instance), use H1 for the main headline on the
page and H2, H3, etc. for subheads. The
heading hierarchy is meaningful. Ideally, the
page does not skip levels.
Improve tables on your web site.
Tables have a logical reading order from left to right, top to
bottom, tables should be labeled with alternative text, data tables
should have the entire first row designated as a Header Row in table
properties, Header cells should be tagged with the TH tag and data
cells should be tagged with the TD tag.
Create web pages and blogs from articles and data in your PDF
files
PDF files are not accessible for screen readers, and in addition,
they are often are difficult for someone with low vision, using a
screen enhancer, to read as well. In addition, putting the text on
your web site, rather than a picture of the text (which is what a
PDF is), makes the content much easier to find and improves search
engine optimization (SEO).
Rescan historic or art material you have scanned into PDF that,
in their current form, would be hard for someone with low vision,
using a screen magnifier, to read.
This
free guide from the University of South Florida can help them.
Caption your online videos - and improve captioning generated
automatically
Captioning videos on YouTube is so incredibly easy. In fact, YouTube
does this automatically - but you need to go in and listen to the
audio and correct how YouTube has interpreted what is said. I taught
myself to do this in about 30 minutes - many volunteers already know
how to do it!
Create audio descriptions of your image-only online videos
This can be a really fun project for a volunteer, to go through a
short video where you have no voices, or few voices, mostly images
and music, and lay in an audio description of what is happening, so
that someone who has a sight-impairment can get your message and
info too!
Create transcriptions of podcasts, speeches and other recordings
A quick way to do this is for the volunteer to upload the podcast
privately to his or her own YouTube channel, let YouTube
automatically close caption the audio-only "video", then download
the caption file and correct it, then post it as a transcription.
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:
Wanna fix about 35 to 40% of navigation
#accessibility issues for sighted keyboard users at once?
Go to your CSS and get rid of every occurrence of:
{outline: none;} or {outline: 0;}
STOP taking the visible focus indicator away from end users.
Yeah. It’s really that simple.
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.
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