Accessibility = solidarity

Would you give a worker the silent treatment because of the colour of their skin, or their first language, or their gender?

Of course not.

For one thing, it’s gross.

For another thing, it’s a self-inflicted wound. We’re only as strong as our solidarity – how solid are we being when we create comms that can’t be read or understood by whole groups of workers who can’t see, hear, or maneuver a mouse?

Three other reasons accessibility is important:

Intimidated? Don’t be! Creating accessible comms is easy when you follow a few simple rules:

Accessible comms checklist

Text

Multimedia

  • Add alt-text to every image – A picture is worth a thousands words – but what if a worker can’t see pictures?

  • Check your colour contrast! – If you’re using a colour background, make sure everybody can see text and logos in the foreground

  • Add captions and transcripts to every video – Unions give workers a voice – but what if a worker can’t hear voices?

Language and culture

  • Big bonus marks – Think about workers who still might not be able to access your info. What if they don’t speak English or French? What if they’re new to North American culture, or new to the idea of a union?

Text accessibility

All-caps are all bad

All-caps cause all manner of trouble and confusion.

  • They’re more difficult to decipher
  • They make it seem like you’re shouting and hectoring – cringe!
  • They make important information inaccessible to all. Take this sentence as an example:

LEVAR BURTON, WHO PLAYED GEORDI LA FORGE ON THE BEST STAR TREK SERIES, WAS BORN 3/4/61

      • What is the correct spelling of the actor’s name?
        Is it Levar Burton or LeVar Burton? With this text, it’s impossible to say for sure. 

      • What is the correct spelling of the character’s name?
        Is it Geordi la Forge or Geordi La Forge? With this text, it’s impossible to say for sure. 

      • On what day was the actor born?
        OK, this isn’t an all-caps issue, but it might as well be. Were they born March 4 or April 3? With this text, it’s impossible to say for sure.

Underlines that undermine

Underlined text is widely understood to indicate a clickable link.

When people see text that is underlined for emphasis, they’re left confused and irritated that clicking the underlined text doesn’t do anything. Are they doing it wrong? Is their device broken? Is your document or website broken?

It’s now best-practice to completely avoid using underlines for emphasis or decoration — they’ll just undermine your usability and credibility.

 

Mark your headings and paragraphs

Making accessible documents is as easy as H1, H2, H3 (and a whole lot of Ps)

Most text-editing programs will give you the option to mark a line as a “heading” or a “paragraph” or a variety of other things.

The “heading” marks are key to accessible documents because they help computers understand the document’s structure.

This isn’t highly important for shorter documents that don’t have separate sections or subsections.

But if your document does have sections or subsections, just increasing the font size won’t cut it for all users.

People who can see the bigger fonts might get it, but not people using screen-readers or text-to-speech. For them, they’ll just have to listen to the entire document without being able to skip quickly to a different section.

Setting your headings is also very helpful for those reading by site — text programs like Microsoft Word and websites will be able to use the headings to automatically create clickable tables of content – no extra coding required!

And one last thing on headings – there can be only one H1! H1 headings are like the title of a book or a report. Once you’ve set your H1, you can use as many H2s and H3s as you need!

 

Multimedia accessibility

Check your contrast

Some people have no problem reading red text on a green background. But for people who have a hard time telling red from green, they might as well be looking at invisible ink.

The important thing is having enough contrast between foreground and background. 

Emergency strike vote: 4/4/24

Vote now at opseu.org

Emergency strike vote: 4/4/24

Vote now at opseu.org

The good news is that this excellent contrast-checking tool – webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ will help you figure out if you have met the legal minimums for contrast.

The site gives you a nice “colour picker” to get the colour value for your foreground and background. It tells you if you “pass” or “fail” minimum contrast ratios, and even gives you handy light/dark sliders to quickly tweak your contrast levels into “pass” territory.

Here’s a video demonstration:

Alt-ways add alt-text to your images

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and with good reason — a single image can convey an incredible amount of information and emotion.

But if somebody can’t see that a picture, they’re frozen out from all the info and emotion it communicates.

That’s where alt-text comes in. It’s a 10- to 20-word description that helps ensure everybody gets the picture’s message.

Writing good alt-text isn’t always easy — you’re essentially boiling a picture’s 1,000 words down to just 10 or 20.

It’s a bit like poetry — there’s no right or wrong, there’s a lot of room for creativity and cleverness, and the more you do it, the better you’ll get.

Alt-text examples

Here’s one that’s pretty straightforward:

A large crowd of people, some holding flags, raise their arms in solidarity and celebration.

Decent al-text for this image could be something like:

A large crowd of people, some holding flags, raise their arms in solidarity and celebration.

Here’s another one that’s a bit tougher:

An Ontario trillium shielded by three lines beside the text OPSEU SEFPO

Decent alt-text for the OPSEU/SEFPO logo could be something like:

An Ontario trillium shielded by three lines beside the text OPSEU SEFPO

Now here’s a really challenging image:

Three people try to watch a ballgame over a fence. They have three equal-sized boxes they can stand up on. The tallest person doesn’t need a box to see over the fence and the shortest person needs two. If everybody gets an equal number of boxes, one still can’t see. But when each gets the boxes they need, all three can see.

This is such an excellent image because it so clearly captures the essential difference between equality and equity.

And when you think about it, it’s also a great illustration of the difference between creating comms with and without an accessibility approach.

On the left, everybody gets the exact same help accessing the ballgame — just like if everybody got the exact same PDF to access an important document like a collective agreement. It will work fine for everybody who reads by sight, but might be a garbled, baffling mess for anybody using screen-reader or text-to-speech tech.

On the right, people get different help to meet their different needs. It’s not equality, it’s accessibility.

But back to the task at hand … how do you boil all that down into alt-text?

Here’s one possibility:

Three people try to watch a ballgame over a fence. They have three equal-sized boxes they can stand up on. The tallest person doesn’t need a box to see over the fence and the shortest person needs two. If everybody gets an equal number of boxes, one still can’t see. But when each gets the boxes they need, all three can see.

That’s more than 20 words!

Yes, but the 20-word rule is actually more of a rule-of-thumb. Try hard to keep it short, but try harder to keep it true to the image.