Letter #58: Is your content inclusive or are you leaving money on the table?
Expert interview on improving your content’s accessibility
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Two Sundays back, I tuned into a webinar recording I had been meaning to watch. Hardly a few minutes into the show and I hit exit.
And I didn’t look back even though I promised myself I’d return to it. Know why? Because even on the highest volume setting on my mobile device, I had trouble hearing what the speakers were saying.
The infection in my ear meant I couldn’t use the AirPods in both ears.
I shrugged, thinking it was my ear’s fault. In the back of my mind though, a thought kept squirming for attention: what about others? What about the ones who are permanently hard of hearing?
Put this way, you’d see: it wasn’t the infection or my impacted hearing. It was the content’s lack of accessibility.
Although making your content more inclusive is the kind thing to do, there’s more from a business perspective (read: convincing stakeholder lens): disabled people have an online spending power of $19 billion (!).
Translation: not paying attention to your content design’s accessibility is costing you money.
Some common culprits birthing inaccessibility that Content Designer and one of my early Twitter friends, Laura Parker, notes are:
Missing link text
Low contrast on text
Poor error messages
Walls of text on the page
Missing alt text on images
Number 4 is a personal pet peeve.
The question now is: how can you improve your content design?
Laura shares the secrets by answering the three questions we ask every expert:
A mistake Laura made when learning about content accessibility
An actionable tip to get you one step closer to making content inclusive
And, a secret tip to improve conversions by working on your content design
Let’s hit it:
👉 Learn from Laura’s mistake: Not opening your work to criticism.
Laura shares she struggled with sharing her work. But not sharing means you can’t learn what accessibility mistakes you’re making.
So: share > welcome feedback > test > repeat.
“People criticize your work in real life, and sometimes that’s hard. But you are only guessing if you never test your work with people with different needs.”
👉 Do this today: Catch your own bias.
Network with people with different needs to learn their struggles and requirements.
Laura advises:
“Identify your own bias (we’re all biased), seek out people different from you, and listen to them. Most of my knowledge comes from listening to people with lived experience.”
👉 The secret tip to making your content accessible: Learn and apply accessibility best practices.
“Use the UK Home Office’s designing for accessibility posters to improve your content for everybody, including people with dyslexia, autism, low vision, and motor disabilities.”
More resources to reference: Microsoft’s inclusive design toolkit and Accessible Social.
So today’s takeaways:
Share and test your work with people with different needs
Identify your own bias by connecting with and listening to others’ needs
Bookmark and reference accessibility toolkits to improve your content design
That’s all. What’s something you’d do today to improve your content’s accessibility? Hit reply and tell me.
Cheers,
Masooma
We usually make a video or two that are reused the entire year. I will make sure they are open caption, but not with the wall of words. Thank you for the references. Never thought of this for taxes and accounting. My mind has been blown. Hope your ears are better.