Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2022

The Global Accessibility Awareness Day aims to get more people thinking and learning about digital inclusion and making the internet more accessible for those with a disability or impairment. We hate the word impairment, our Managing Director has long been challenging our sector to change the use of this terminology as she herself doesn’t class herself as impaired, preferring to think of herself as quirky.

With there being more than one billion people with a disability, we believe that it’s something more organisations should be working towards accessibility for all.

It’s not only one billion people potentially not being able to get on to your website. For companies that don’t want to make the change for ethical or moral reasons, it can be useful to discuss the spending power and influence of one billion people that companies and websites are missing out on over small adjustments.

Many of us are so used to using the internet, that we don’t consider those who might not find it as easily accessible. It’s definitely something which should be thought of much more often, which is why the Global Accessibility Awareness Day began.

Things that can be done

There are simple steps an organisation can take to make their website more accessible, and these things can also be taken on board when we are posting things online too, for example on social media:

• Add image alt text when adding an image to a webpage
• Use #CamelCase when hashtagging (capitalise the first letter of each word)
• Make sure text is readable, not too low contrast
• Don’t use jargon

   

If you have a website, there’s also a number of companies who will run accessibility checks on your website for you. These companies will assess the accessibility of your website and give you things which you should improve on, for more people to be able to access your site easily. And you can also use software like we use at Cura. We use a software called ReciteMe, you can check this out on our dedicated accessibility page. 

Some of the most common conditions that can affect a person’s accessibility are to do with vision, hearing, motor and cognitive skills. Each of these can affect a person differently so different adjustments should be made.

A person who is partly sighted might benefit from alternative test descriptions whereas hard of hearing might need captioning for videos for example. There are also people who might need certain keyboards or devices to help them type and others might find it more difficult to access a website if the page is cluttered or full of jargon and complicated wording.

We try our best to make things as accessible as possible, whether that be providing documents to our clients in braille where possible, adapting the way we communicate with them or making changes to our website. ReciteMe allows our visitors to access the website in a way which suits them. This can allow people to have the text read out loud to them or have the text downloaded to listen back to, the size and font of text can be changed, it can translate to over 100 different languages if English is not your first language, and it can also search for words on a dictionary if you’re not sure what something means.

We think these are quite small adjustments to be made in the grand scheme of things. For the small amount of time it might take for us to change things or add software to our website, a big impact can be made on how easily a person can access what they need.

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