Check for Accessibility Compliance

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is gaining importance within organizations’ agendas and key results, including hiring practices, policies, and workplace culture. Most people are familiar with DEI when related to race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality — all of which are vitally important.

Disability, however, feels somehow left out of the conversation. And this can be taken quite literally, as sometimes presentations, events, websites, emails, meetings and even 1:1 conversations are not accessible to all.

Usually, when people think about accessibility, physical accommodations come to mind, especially for people in wheelchairs. But there’s much more to accessibility than that: text, images, colors, structure, tables, lists, links, closed captioning… all these need to be taken in consideration when building accessible content deliverables, whether it’s a massive brochure or an individual email.

Likewise, besides ramps, elevators, and accessible restrooms, you need to think about coffee and cocktail tables, registration desk height and depth, availability of charger outlets, mic placement (when planning in-person events), as well as transcripts, polling, chats, etc (when hosting hybrid or virtual events).

I have created these guidelines to help you:

1. Understand Diversity – Inclusion – Accessibility: their meaning and how they relate

2. Create accessible content: text, images, colors, structure, tables, lists, links… what is needed to make them accessible for content creation

3. Host accessible events: from planning to execution, what needs to be taken into consideration for hosting accessible events

Please review and #becomea11y!