Accessibility Design

1 in 4 of us need accessibility

What is accessibility design?

Why should you care?

When you speak to someone, you hope they receive your communication and understand it.

There are ways of helping your communications reach their intended recipients in life, like on the web.

Why bother with accessibility?

Why bother with designing for accessibility? Do you have time to worry about everything? Of course not, but it is in your best interest to learn how to create accessibility.

Actually, about 26%—one in four Americans live with a disability. If you want to share your message, your event, your words, images, and thoughts with them, there are steps to take.

Do well by doing good

What if I told you that you can do well by doing good? Take small, thoughtful steps to help make things accessible to people with hearing or visual disabilities. This can increase your market share. You will also be raising your search engine visibility.

One way to think of alternate descriptions is like an extra tag or sign on an item at the store. So if you were looking for snack foods, but wanted gluten-free, this helps you find it better and faster.

Everyone on social media talks about the algorithm and “feeding the algorithm”. To put it bluntly, why wouldn’t you want to add extra descriptions to your content and make your story, image, or music stand out?

What I learned from Google

Google offered an online course through SCORE. It was simple and sweet. Here are the basic takeaways:

Optimizing your content will help people find you.
Google will reward optimization by increasing your SEO ranking.
You will make the world better by being inclusive.
On top of all that, it will help you lessen your legal risk.

And here are some of the reasons I care deeply about this:

What we do at Handy Entertainment means accessibility is not just good business–it is fundamental.
We’re nimble. That means we can adjust things quickly and well.
We (and you) have much more impact by reaching people where they are by including them.
Inclusion is not just wheelchair accessibility.
Just having Braille available is not truly inclusion (though it’s a good start).
An ASL interpreter is not the full scoop on inclusion.
Inclusion is about welcoming people wherever they are and providing them with the tools to participate.

Some digital content design accessibility elements

Image descriptions
Alt text and descriptions
Color contrast
Design techniques
Text formatting and headers
Text links
Video captions and transcripts.

How does accessibility impact your industry?

Accessibility Design