How Volunteers Can Help Your Organization 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:

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).

Make PDF files accessible.
A volunteer, or group of volunteers, could make all PDFs on a web site accessible for different screen readers (and therefore for people with disabilities), and/or convert key information in PDF files to HTML to be shared as web pages.

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.

Also see:

Make All Volunteering as Accessible as Possible
Tips for creating an accommodating and welcoming environment for volunteers with disabilities.
Short-term Assignments for Tech Volunteers
There are a variety of ways for mission-based organizations to involve volunteers to help with short-term projects relating to computers and the Internet, and short-term assignments are what are sought after most by potential "tech" volunteers. But there is a disconnect: most organizations have trouble identifying such short-term projects. This is a list of short-term projects for "tech" volunteers -- assignments that might takes days, weeks or just a couple of months to complete.
One(-ish) Day "Tech" Activities for Volunteers
Volunteers are getting together for intense, one-day events, or events of just a few days, to build web pages, to write code, to edit Wikipedia pages, and more. These are gatherings of onsite volunteers, where everyone is in one location, together, to do an online-related project in one day, or a few days. It's a form of episodic volunteering, because volunteers don't have to make an ongoing commitment - they can come to the event, contribute their services, and then leave and never volunteer again. Because computers are involved, these events are sometimes called hackathons, even if coding isn't involved. This page provides advice on how to put together a one-day event, or just-a-few-days-of activity, for a group of tech volunteers onsite, working together, for a nonprofit, non-governmental organization (NGO), community-focused government program, school or other mission-based organization - or association of such.

Making certain volunteers feel unwelcomed because of your language and Do you welcome people with your language?, blogs I wrote after I observed a volunteer recognition event description on Facebook and a post on Facebook that implied something about firefighters.
Welcoming immigrants as volunteers at your organization
There's so much you can do to welcome and accommodate immigrants as volunteers at your nonprofit, charity, school or other organization, bringing you an even greater pool of talent and ideas.
Screening Volunteers for Attitude
When an organization involves volunteers in high-responsibility, long-term roles, volunteer turnover can be a program killer. Screening is vital to finding the right people for high-responsibility, long-term volunteer roles, particularly those where the volunteer will work with clients and the general public, and to screen out people who may be better in shorter-term assignments or assignments where they would not work with clients or the general public, or who would not be appropriate in any role at the organization.
Recruiting Local Volunteers To Increase Diversity Among the Ranks
Having plenty of volunteers usually isn't enough to say a volunteering program is successful. Another indicator of success is if your volunteers represent a variety of ages, education-levels, economic levels and other demographics, or are a reflection of your local community. Most organizations don't want volunteers to be a homogeneous group; they want to reach a variety of people as volunteers (and donors and other supporters, for that matter). This resource will help you think about how to recruit for diversity, or to reach a specific demographic.
Volunteering to build community cohesion
Engaging volunteers isn’t always just to get a task done. Sometimes, volunteering has much larger, more important goals – like a group volunteering effort done to help demonstrate solidarity and understanding between different groups. Volunteers can help build community cohesion and better community understanding. Volunteers can help change minds – without ever asking volunteers to change their minds.
Creating Group Volunteering Activities
Details on not just what groups of volunteers can do in a two-hour, half-day or all-day event, but also just how much an organization or program will need to do to prepare a site for group volunteering. It's an expensive, time-consuming endeavor - are you ready? Is it worth it?
Volunteering to Address Your Own Mental Health (Depression, Loneliness, Anxiety, etc.): Realistic advice on volunteering to address your loneliness, depression, anxiety, etc., and to avoid an experience that will make you feel worse instead of better.

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

Also see:

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