Accessibility, powered by company-wide training

Rachel Martin is the product manager and accessibility champion at Good Grants.

Recently I attended an online Zoom meeting with a number of people from several organisations. Also on the call was a visually impaired person using a screen reader to access content. 

The presenter began sharing slides for a design they had developed with the slides containing mostly images and diagrams. They talked about their design and progressed through the presentation without describing the content of each slide. 

This excluded the visually impaired person who was unable to follow along in the same way sighted people could. Another person on the call asked the presenter to describe each slide. There was an awkward back and forth before the presenter understood the problem.

Accessibility is not just for engineering teams. It’s for everyone—the people who make content for social media to those who write help centre articles and, as my example demonstrates, for people giving presentations. 

Awkward experiences like this one can be avoided with a bit of knowledge about the issues faced by people with disabilities, which is why we require accessibility training at Creative Force.

Tips on sharing accessible-friendly content over Zoom

To address the issue above, there are things we can do to share content. When you’re in an online meeting and share your screen with participants, the content on your computer is completely unavailable to a visually impaired person. Their screen reader does not have access to the content on your computer even when screen sharing.

What can you do about this?

1. Describe the content
   Provide an audio description of each slide. If there are images, explain what the image is and why it’s relevant. Are there people in it? What are they doing and how do they look? If there’s a diagram, explain what it is. When you read a novel there’s no visual prompt. Instead the author will provide a description so you can form a visual image in your mind. You have to take the same approach in your presentation. You are the author and need to describe the image a visually impaired person will create for themselves.
2. Share the slides with meeting attendees in advance.
   Email slides to any visually impaired participants prior to the meeting so they can read them in advance with a screen reader. This will also allow them to have them open during your presentation so they can better follow along.
3. Make slides accessible
   If you are creating slides then make sure you understand accessibility features available in the software you use to create them. For instance, Microsoft PowerPoint has accessibility features you can use, like adding alt descriptions for images and diagrams. See their help article on accessibility features to learn more. But note that these will only be useful to a person with disabilities if they have the slides on their own computer.
4. Are slides really necessary?
   We all sit through hours and hours of bullet points on slides every week but is it really necessary? Could you deliver the same message some other way?

Accessibility at Good Grants

As I mentioned above, accessibility is for the entire team, and especially, our product at the centre of it all. We ensure our software works for everyone. Good Grants is designed, tested and maintained with accessibility in mind.

Good Grants is compliant with WCAG 2.1 AA Standards (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, EN 301 549 accessibility requirements and Section 508 accessibility standards. 

What does that all mean in practice? It means Good Grants:

• Is screen-reader friendly
• Can be completely navigated by a user’s keyboard
• Provides flexible colour options
• Has easy-to-read fonts and layouts
• Provides video captions
• And more!

Read more about accessibility at Good Grants.

Learn more about accessibility training

As part of our accessibility in practice, all our staff are required to complete accessibility training through the W3C Introduction to Web Accessibility course.  

Different modules from the course are required for different teams but each person can optionally complete the whole course for a certificate. While it is comprehensive training, we allow a generous time frame for completion and all new employees complete it as part of their induction.