E10: Learning what I miss everyday about accessibility
Making yourself, your workplace, and your community more accessible - lessons shared from Sheri Byrne-Haber.
I had the opportunity yesterday to spend time learning from Sheri Byrne-Haber, an expert on the fields of disability and accessibility in business and education. Although I’ve thought a lot about accessibility and inclusion in schools or classrooms where I have worked, I haven’t given much thought to accessibility at a McDonald’s drive-through, when online shopping, or when sharing work or ideas with others.
Getting introduced to Sheri and her work was inspiring but also challenging. Sheri has impacted billions of people globally by helping brand-name companies shift how they do business to ensure that 1 in 5 of us experiencing disabilities can have more access to products, goods, information, and services.
Sheri’s commitment to accessibility emerged from raising a deaf daughter and from a life spent navigating the world in a wheelchair. She has obtained degrees in law, computer science, and business, among many other certifications, to help change a world that is for the most part set up to cater to able-bodied and neurotypical persons.
Sheri shared many “micro-skills” and tips that I found immediately useful and practical. I hope these tips will encourage you to look up her work to learn more from her.
Closed captioning. When you have a virtual meeting with a group, enable closed captioning. Here are some reasons to do it. Hearing loss is the most common congenital disability, we are visual learners, it’s much easier to access web content in noisy spaces with captions on & studies have found users are more likely to respond favorably and stick with videos displayed with captions. Not all web conference software services are built the same - check to see if captioning is an option (Zoom does allow users to turn on captioning for themselves).
Think before you show. Please reference Sheri’s blog post for more specifics, but if you are delivering any type of visual content (e.g., Powerpoint slides)…consider the needs of your audience with vision loss (13% of the US population) or color blindness (6% of the population). Here are a few best practices she recommends: send out your presentation materials in advance, don’t embed text in images since it’s much harder to read, avoid low contrast colors, & keep motion to a minimum. Run the PowerPoint Accessibility Checker (yes, it’s that easy to do the right thing).
Note: I’ve broken every one of Sheri’s guidelines.
Applying Ted Lasso management lessons to accessibility (just read it)
Do you know your document’s readability and your audience’s reading levels? When you are ready to share a report, blog post, or other written communication, along with hitting spell check, why not find out if what you are saying is in plain English? Microsoft Word can give you a grade level score and FORCAST can be used for more technical documents. Sheri reminded me that you will reach many more people if your messages are tailored for a broader audience.
Beware of using Word Clouds. I like using word clouds, but with average vision, I have often needed to squint at the results shared using online programs like Mentimeter. Consider letting your participants vote in the chat box (if virtual) or offer words via the chat function or to a designated person (if in person). Sheri also noted that juggling a phone or laptop to vote or join in on polling may not be easy or accessible unless we plan ahead.
I hope you will take a look and use 1-2 of Sheri’s tips in your work, classroom, or organization this month. I think all of the ideas Sheri shared are universally helpful and would improve all our communications.
One step I will take is to use the voice-to-text feature for all future posts I shared on Substack.
Sheri ended her presentation by reminding her audience yesterday of 2 simple but important points:
“Disability is one of the most intersectional dimensions of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) because anybody can become disabled at any time, regardless of what their other identities are. Most disabilities are acquired; not congenital,” said Sheri.
“If you want to be perceived as inclusive, you have to BE inclusive. Otherwise, your words and actions are merely performative”
Resources: