Accessibility features, products and services are of limited benefit if
consumers do not know
what is available, or how to access and use them. Companies that have taken the step of
creating a website focused on accessibility are reaching out to users who need that
information. Knowing the essential components to provide a sup
portive and positive
experience for users with disabilities will enable companies to develop or improve their
accessibility websites.
Intuit is in the process of developing an acc
essibility statement and resource center.
Rather
than reinvent the wheel, decided to research what other technology, e
-
commerce, finance,
transportation, and educational companies have done to see what works and what does not.
Inclusivity in 2020 and Beyond: Reimagining Gender: Is Your HR Organization R...Aggregage
Perceptions around gender are changing rapidly. Companies must understand how to navigate this universe, but that's easier said than done. In this session, Lisa Kenney — CEO of Reimagine Gender — will be your guide, explaining what gender is (and isn't) in the first place. Lisa will provide concrete tips on how to create more inclusive processes, policies, and practices. Furthermore, Lisa will address topics including pronouns, training, and job application forms, and will also share broader insights about how gender affects every person at the company. There will also be plenty of time to answer your questions on gender.
This model is of our business ' The Mentors ' . People who are interested in doing counselling can get an idea from this ppt. It include business model canvas and all the important things that needs to run a business.
Optimizing the Student Recruitment ExperienceHobsons
Hobsons Consulting discusses the impacts of the relationship management processes that schools can embrace to communicate with more relevance, meaning, and efficiency to connect with the right types of students and ultimately increase -- or at least maintain -- yield.
Intead's 2nd webinar on how to market universities to the world in light of the U.S. presidential election results (a bit more perspective than we had even 2 weeks ago).
Inclusivity in 2020 and Beyond: Reimagining Gender: Is Your HR Organization R...Aggregage
Perceptions around gender are changing rapidly. Companies must understand how to navigate this universe, but that's easier said than done. In this session, Lisa Kenney — CEO of Reimagine Gender — will be your guide, explaining what gender is (and isn't) in the first place. Lisa will provide concrete tips on how to create more inclusive processes, policies, and practices. Furthermore, Lisa will address topics including pronouns, training, and job application forms, and will also share broader insights about how gender affects every person at the company. There will also be plenty of time to answer your questions on gender.
This model is of our business ' The Mentors ' . People who are interested in doing counselling can get an idea from this ppt. It include business model canvas and all the important things that needs to run a business.
Optimizing the Student Recruitment ExperienceHobsons
Hobsons Consulting discusses the impacts of the relationship management processes that schools can embrace to communicate with more relevance, meaning, and efficiency to connect with the right types of students and ultimately increase -- or at least maintain -- yield.
Intead's 2nd webinar on how to market universities to the world in light of the U.S. presidential election results (a bit more perspective than we had even 2 weeks ago).
Diversity is about much more than equal opportunity – it can actually drive business success. But building a diverse community and, in turn, a brand that promotes diversity, takes time. This webcast presentation gives you with the skills to engage diverse talent and build a brand that puts diversity first. It also showcases how Starbucks approaches attracting diverse talent.
Learn more about LinkedIn Talent Solutions: https://lnkd.in/g3NRhUJ
The Impact Outweighs the Effort: Effective and Impactful CRM and Online Appli...Hobsons
The impact outweighs the effort – effective and impactful CRM and online application implementation
College Marketing Network Annual Conference
12 November 2016
Daniel Falls, Head of HE Consulting Services
Gregory Fowler, a speaker at the marcus evans University Leadership Summit 2022, discusses the changing landscape of online learning experiences, and how to meet student needs.
The Future of Learning and How to Ensure Student Success-Gregory Fowler, Univ...marcus evans Network
Ahead of the marcus evans University Leadership Summit 2022, read here an interview with Gregory Fowler on the changing landscape of online learning experiences, and how to meet student needs.
Hiring Manager Challenge Report Job Ad
Hiring Manager Challenge Report Job Ad
Community Relations Coordinator
City of Plantation, Florida - Plantation, FL 33317
$29,120 - $49,734 a year
Description
This is a non-exempt position, which is responsible for technical work in providing positive public relations and information to the public about police, city and other functions offered at the Police Department's Community Outreach Center. An employee in this classification is responsible for developing, organizing, promoting and coordinating community relation programs for the Plantation Police Department.
Employees are hired as AT WILL employees that serve at the pleasure of the City and may be terminated at any time with or without cause.
Examples of Duties
· Develops, plans, and organizes new programs and events which will promote the City and the Police Department.
· Attends regular meetings for various community organizations.
· Assists the public with obtaining various services and programs offered by the Police Department and City.
· Coordinates and supports events with Department approved charitable organizations in the community.
· Schedules and sets up the conference room for meetings and teaches classes in areas of interest to the community.
· Schedules, advertises, coordinates, and facilitates the Police Department's Citizen Police Academy.
· Organizes programs through grants.
· Coordinates and prepares award nominations and ceremony presentations for Department members.
· This position does not have final procurement authority.
· Performs related duties as required and as directed.
Typical Qualifications
· Considerable knowledge of Municipal, State, and County services, and the ability to identify resources in obtaining and providing accurate information to the public.
· Must have ability to attend community events including some evenings and weekends.
· Knowledge of modern office practices and procedures.
· Must possess good knowledge of social media platforms for marketing and advertising of special events.
· Must be able to obtain necessary certifications, when appropriate, for various topics instructed.
· Must have good understanding of crime prevention practices, strategies, and programs, and have the ability to obtain appropriate crime prevention certifications.
· Must have good working knowledge of the City and the Police Department's policies and procedures.
· Knowledge of proper telephone etiquette and procedures; ability to handle situations and to deal effectively with the general public on the telephone and in person.
· Knowledge of modern information systems and standard software such as Windows, Word and Excel with the ability to learn new applications.
· Ability to interface effectively with many different types of individuals and organizations, while maintaining a professional and pleasant demeanor.
· Ability to maintain a high level of job proficiency with minimal supervision.
· Ability to create new programs and ev ...
Ellen Wagner, Executive Director, WCET.
Putting Data to Work
This session explores changing data sensibilities at US post-secondary institutions with particular attention paid to how predictive analytics are changing expectations for institutional accountability and student success. Results from the Predictive Analytics Reporting Framework show that predictive modeling can identify students at risk and that linking behavioral predictions of risk with interventions to mitigate those risks at the point of need is a powerful strategy for increasing rates of student retention, academic progress and completion.
presentation at the 15th annual SLN SOLsummit February 27, 2014
http://slnsolsummit2014.edublogs.org/
Introduce Trauma-Informed Design to Your Organization - CSUN ATC 2024Ted Drake
Historically, accessibility specialists focused on a narrow set of disabilities. We focused on the senses, such as sight, sound, and touch. We focused on abilities, like hearing, movement, and seeing.
We expanded to include cognitive, mental health, and neurodiversity. This is significant. We now have tools to build inclusive products and services for an estimated 25% of the population. What about the other 75%?
As accessibility professionals, we understand unique experiences and needs. We are best equipped to expand customer research and design at our companies. Universal design was described as a one size fits all solution. Inclusive design is one size fits one. Intersectional design is one size fits one, but also accounts for price, texture, availability, cultural appropriateness, and more.
This presentation introduces the next layer of inclusive design; one that recognizes trauma.
Trauma-Informed Design (TID) started in education, health, and community spaces. It focuses on the person’s experiences, recognizing trauma’s impact, anxiety, and restoring personal control. Architects embraced TID to develop spaces that are comfortable instead of confrontive.
While the earlier stages of TID focused on individualized experiences, we can still take the principles and apply them to web and mobile application design. This is especially critical for emerging AI powered experiences where transparency and collective understanding are rarely considered.
Transforming Accessibility one lunch at a tiime - CSUN 2023Ted Drake
Try to remember March 2020. The COVID epidemic was raging and businesses sent everyone home to work remotely. Ted Drake and Sagar Barbhaya were at the 2020 CSUN ATC conference. Returning to our homes, we wondered if we could continue the energy and curiosity found at a conference, only transforming it for a virtual work environment. The following week, we launched Intuit’s Zoom-based Accessibility Lunch and Learn series. It was an experiment planned to last only a few weeks. We reached out to our Accessibility Champion network and quickly arranged daily lectures, mostly based on presentations already given at onboarding and other training events. As the epidemic grew, we turned inward and focused less on accessibility and more on our mental health, living with a disability, and celebrating our diversity. The key transformation came with a talk about sobriety in the workplace. The speaker’s courage to discuss her journey led to heartfelt conversations about mental health, the loss of community, and the struggle where colleagues were trying to encourage hope with “happy hours” and alcohol-related team building activities. This presentation led to immediate improvements in our workplace language and pandemic policies. It also showed a lunch and learn was more than a lecture. It could be the community we were aching for. With more than 100 presentations and thousands of participants, we continue to learn something new every week.
More Related Content
Similar to Accessibility statements and resource publishing best practices csun 2019
Diversity is about much more than equal opportunity – it can actually drive business success. But building a diverse community and, in turn, a brand that promotes diversity, takes time. This webcast presentation gives you with the skills to engage diverse talent and build a brand that puts diversity first. It also showcases how Starbucks approaches attracting diverse talent.
Learn more about LinkedIn Talent Solutions: https://lnkd.in/g3NRhUJ
The Impact Outweighs the Effort: Effective and Impactful CRM and Online Appli...Hobsons
The impact outweighs the effort – effective and impactful CRM and online application implementation
College Marketing Network Annual Conference
12 November 2016
Daniel Falls, Head of HE Consulting Services
Gregory Fowler, a speaker at the marcus evans University Leadership Summit 2022, discusses the changing landscape of online learning experiences, and how to meet student needs.
The Future of Learning and How to Ensure Student Success-Gregory Fowler, Univ...marcus evans Network
Ahead of the marcus evans University Leadership Summit 2022, read here an interview with Gregory Fowler on the changing landscape of online learning experiences, and how to meet student needs.
Hiring Manager Challenge Report Job Ad
Hiring Manager Challenge Report Job Ad
Community Relations Coordinator
City of Plantation, Florida - Plantation, FL 33317
$29,120 - $49,734 a year
Description
This is a non-exempt position, which is responsible for technical work in providing positive public relations and information to the public about police, city and other functions offered at the Police Department's Community Outreach Center. An employee in this classification is responsible for developing, organizing, promoting and coordinating community relation programs for the Plantation Police Department.
Employees are hired as AT WILL employees that serve at the pleasure of the City and may be terminated at any time with or without cause.
Examples of Duties
· Develops, plans, and organizes new programs and events which will promote the City and the Police Department.
· Attends regular meetings for various community organizations.
· Assists the public with obtaining various services and programs offered by the Police Department and City.
· Coordinates and supports events with Department approved charitable organizations in the community.
· Schedules and sets up the conference room for meetings and teaches classes in areas of interest to the community.
· Schedules, advertises, coordinates, and facilitates the Police Department's Citizen Police Academy.
· Organizes programs through grants.
· Coordinates and prepares award nominations and ceremony presentations for Department members.
· This position does not have final procurement authority.
· Performs related duties as required and as directed.
Typical Qualifications
· Considerable knowledge of Municipal, State, and County services, and the ability to identify resources in obtaining and providing accurate information to the public.
· Must have ability to attend community events including some evenings and weekends.
· Knowledge of modern office practices and procedures.
· Must possess good knowledge of social media platforms for marketing and advertising of special events.
· Must be able to obtain necessary certifications, when appropriate, for various topics instructed.
· Must have good understanding of crime prevention practices, strategies, and programs, and have the ability to obtain appropriate crime prevention certifications.
· Must have good working knowledge of the City and the Police Department's policies and procedures.
· Knowledge of proper telephone etiquette and procedures; ability to handle situations and to deal effectively with the general public on the telephone and in person.
· Knowledge of modern information systems and standard software such as Windows, Word and Excel with the ability to learn new applications.
· Ability to interface effectively with many different types of individuals and organizations, while maintaining a professional and pleasant demeanor.
· Ability to maintain a high level of job proficiency with minimal supervision.
· Ability to create new programs and ev ...
Ellen Wagner, Executive Director, WCET.
Putting Data to Work
This session explores changing data sensibilities at US post-secondary institutions with particular attention paid to how predictive analytics are changing expectations for institutional accountability and student success. Results from the Predictive Analytics Reporting Framework show that predictive modeling can identify students at risk and that linking behavioral predictions of risk with interventions to mitigate those risks at the point of need is a powerful strategy for increasing rates of student retention, academic progress and completion.
presentation at the 15th annual SLN SOLsummit February 27, 2014
http://slnsolsummit2014.edublogs.org/
Introduce Trauma-Informed Design to Your Organization - CSUN ATC 2024Ted Drake
Historically, accessibility specialists focused on a narrow set of disabilities. We focused on the senses, such as sight, sound, and touch. We focused on abilities, like hearing, movement, and seeing.
We expanded to include cognitive, mental health, and neurodiversity. This is significant. We now have tools to build inclusive products and services for an estimated 25% of the population. What about the other 75%?
As accessibility professionals, we understand unique experiences and needs. We are best equipped to expand customer research and design at our companies. Universal design was described as a one size fits all solution. Inclusive design is one size fits one. Intersectional design is one size fits one, but also accounts for price, texture, availability, cultural appropriateness, and more.
This presentation introduces the next layer of inclusive design; one that recognizes trauma.
Trauma-Informed Design (TID) started in education, health, and community spaces. It focuses on the person’s experiences, recognizing trauma’s impact, anxiety, and restoring personal control. Architects embraced TID to develop spaces that are comfortable instead of confrontive.
While the earlier stages of TID focused on individualized experiences, we can still take the principles and apply them to web and mobile application design. This is especially critical for emerging AI powered experiences where transparency and collective understanding are rarely considered.
Transforming Accessibility one lunch at a tiime - CSUN 2023Ted Drake
Try to remember March 2020. The COVID epidemic was raging and businesses sent everyone home to work remotely. Ted Drake and Sagar Barbhaya were at the 2020 CSUN ATC conference. Returning to our homes, we wondered if we could continue the energy and curiosity found at a conference, only transforming it for a virtual work environment. The following week, we launched Intuit’s Zoom-based Accessibility Lunch and Learn series. It was an experiment planned to last only a few weeks. We reached out to our Accessibility Champion network and quickly arranged daily lectures, mostly based on presentations already given at onboarding and other training events. As the epidemic grew, we turned inward and focused less on accessibility and more on our mental health, living with a disability, and celebrating our diversity. The key transformation came with a talk about sobriety in the workplace. The speaker’s courage to discuss her journey led to heartfelt conversations about mental health, the loss of community, and the struggle where colleagues were trying to encourage hope with “happy hours” and alcohol-related team building activities. This presentation led to immediate improvements in our workplace language and pandemic policies. It also showed a lunch and learn was more than a lecture. It could be the community we were aching for. With more than 100 presentations and thousands of participants, we continue to learn something new every week.
Inclusive Design for cognitive disabilities, neurodiversity, and chronic illnessTed Drake
Learn how to design for people with short term memory loss, problems focusing on a task, struggling with anxiety, and dealing with chronic pain. This presentation will introduce you to the people you need to include in your designs. You will also have clear action items for inclusive design.
This talk was presented at the San Diego Accessibility Meetup on August 1, 2022. It explains the basics of affordances, signifiers, cognitive load, and how we can design to reduce the effort needed by our customers to understand and use our products. This also includes updated information on Long COVID and why we need to focus more of our attention on cognitive accessibilty.
Automated accessibility testing can greatly improve the product experience by empowering developers and designers to eliminate repetitive, mundane errors and focus on the challenging and interesting elements. This presentation focuses on the customer experience and how it can be improved by using automated testing throughout the software development cycle.
Ask any accessibility leader about accessible colors and they’ll wince from the pain of struggling for a solution. Why is it so difficult to ensure your product meets WCAG 2.1 AA color contrast requirements? Ted Drake, Intuit’s Global Accessibility Leader, will explain the basics of color accessibility requirements. He will also talk about the conflict of overlapping requirements, dealing with brand colors, using color to denote hierarchy of information, and instances where adequate contrast impedes readability. You will have a better understanding of why accessible color usage is a journey and strategies for making continual progress.
About the Speaker – Ted Drake
Photo of Ted Drake
Ted Drake is the Global Accessibility Leader for Intuit, a financial software company. Intuit’s small and centralized accessibility team has created a culture of inclusive development and design with more than 600 champions. Customer interviews and feedback is key to their development.
Ted started working in accessibility almost 20 years ago, when he was the web site manager for the San Diego Museum of Art. He was also an early adopter of standards-based web development, which treated accessibility as core to engineering. While at Yahoo!, Ted was a front-end engineer, developer evangelist, and co-founded Yahoo’s Accessibility Lab. Ted’s benefited from ample International travel, including many trips to India and two years working out of Europe. Connect with Ted Drake on linkedin.
This presentation is for the Hello A11y conference celebrating Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2020. It introduces how artificial intelligence and machine learning is being used in assistive technology for people with disabilities.
Expand your outreach with an accessibility champions program Ted Drake
Expand your accessibility outreach by creating an accessibility champion program. This presentation was created for the CSUN 20 conference and includes how Intuit and other companies structure their champion program and what you can expect.
Intuit's Accessibility Champion Program - Coaching and Celebrating Ted Drake
This presentation was created for the Accessibility Online webinar series. It explains the goal of Intuit's Accessibility Champion program and explains the steps and successes of this program. The presentation will help you set up a similar problem at your company. Get the full details at this article: http://www.last-child.com/intuits-accessibility-champion-program/
This presentation was created for the Rotary Club of San Francisco to highlight research being done today for assistive technology and how it could appear in mainstream products and services in the future.
Inclusive customer interviews make it your friday taskTed Drake
Customer research has been a core part of Intuit from the earliest days of the company. In the 1980’s Intuit engineers would hang out at computer stores to find people buying Quicken software and ask if they could follow them home to watch their installation process to learn
about pain points and opportunities. Kurt Walecki, Intuit VP of Design, described the importance:
From the very beginning, Intuit has done user research both to understand how customers are using their current products and to identify customers’ unmet needs, allowing them to introduce new products to the market to satisfy them.
Every product and team at Intuit uses customer research and interviews to design and build products and new functionality. Intuit’s use of Lean Startup includesthe mantra “fall in love with
the problem, not the solution”
.
The goal is to understand the customer’s pain points and missed opportunities first, expand on the problem, build prototypes, continually review with the customer to test solutions, and then promote it to a product feature. This customer focus ensures the product grows with useful features and doesn’t bloat with unnecessary technology.
Coaching and Celebrating Accessibility ChampionsTed Drake
Accessibility is
extremely
impor
t
ant
when it comes to developing applications. It is the
right of every customer to get the same experience when they interact with a product and
disability is something t
hat should never come in the way.
Engineers are the folks
responsible for making this hap
pen and hence it is extremely important for them to
be
motivated and passionate around this technology. Let us learn how Intuit does this.
Raising Accessibility Awareness at IntuitTed Drake
This presentation was given for the Bay Area Accessibility and Inclusive Design Meetup group to share Intuit's journey to expand accessibility education and ownership.
Matt May tweeted an observation in 2016 introducing Trickle-Down Accessibility and recognized prioritizing our blind customers could lead to less support for others.
Focusing on screen reader accessibility has distinct advantages for product developers. If your application works with a screen reader, it should also be usable with a keyboard, voice recognition, and switch control devices. Screen reader accessibility also falls in line with automated testing tools.
However, there are many disabilities, and assistive technologies, that are not necessarily benefited by this focus on the blind/low-vision community. Color contrast, closed captioning, readability, consistency in design, user customization, session timeouts, and animation distraction are just a few examples of concerns that often go unaddressed.
Accessibility metrics Accessibility Data Metrics and Reporting – Industry Bes...Ted Drake
Accessible version: http://www.last-child.com/a11y-data-metrics/
Learn how top companies are tracking and graphing product accessibility progress and incorporating data from automated, manual, and user testing to create management dashboards.
Mystery Meat 2.0 – Making hidden mobile interactions accessibleTed Drake
Mystery Meat was the unsavory term for hiding menus behind a parent link. Learn about today’s mobile version and how to make it accessible.
Accessible version: http://www.last-child.com/mystery-meat-2-accessible/
React Native Accessibility - San Diego React and React Native MeetupTed Drake
This presentation was created by Poonam Tathavadkar and Ted Drake for the San Diego React and React Native meetup to introduce mobile accessibility and how to use React Native's functions to build accessible Android and iOS applications.
Ubiquitous Transactions - Financial Future and AccessibilityTed Drake
This short presentation was created for a financial panel at the m-enabling summit 2016. It introduces some new and upcoming standards that could simplify financial transactions and thus making them more accessible. Please see the accessible version of this presentation http://www.last-child.com/ubiquitous-transactions/
This 7-second Brain Wave Ritual Attracts Money To You.!nirahealhty
Discover the power of a simple 7-second brain wave ritual that can attract wealth and abundance into your life. By tapping into specific brain frequencies, this technique helps you manifest financial success effortlessly. Ready to transform your financial future? Try this powerful ritual and start attracting money today!
Multi-cluster Kubernetes Networking- Patterns, Projects and GuidelinesSanjeev Rampal
Talk presented at Kubernetes Community Day, New York, May 2024.
Technical summary of Multi-Cluster Kubernetes Networking architectures with focus on 4 key topics.
1) Key patterns for Multi-cluster architectures
2) Architectural comparison of several OSS/ CNCF projects to address these patterns
3) Evolution trends for the APIs of these projects
4) Some design recommendations & guidelines for adopting/ deploying these solutions.
1.Wireless Communication System_Wireless communication is a broad term that i...JeyaPerumal1
Wireless communication involves the transmission of information over a distance without the help of wires, cables or any other forms of electrical conductors.
Wireless communication is a broad term that incorporates all procedures and forms of connecting and communicating between two or more devices using a wireless signal through wireless communication technologies and devices.
Features of Wireless Communication
The evolution of wireless technology has brought many advancements with its effective features.
The transmitted distance can be anywhere between a few meters (for example, a television's remote control) and thousands of kilometers (for example, radio communication).
Wireless communication can be used for cellular telephony, wireless access to the internet, wireless home networking, and so on.
ER(Entity Relationship) Diagram for online shopping - TAEHimani415946
https://bit.ly/3KACoyV
The ER diagram for the project is the foundation for the building of the database of the project. The properties, datatypes, and attributes are defined by the ER diagram.
2. Why is it important?
● Resources in one place
● Demonstrates commitment to users with disabilities
● Marketing opportunities to highlight other products
● Public relations opportunity to show involvement
with disability communities
3. Why is it important?
“I believe that posted accessibility pages
help organizations avoid legal action — so
long as there is an active phone number
and email address and site visitors get
prompt and positive responses to
feedback....It’s absence a sign that
accessibility is not a priority — or worse.”
– Lainey Feingold
22. Readability - Bad Example
Bank On is a national program managed by the Cities for Financial
Empowerment. It is a comprehensive strategy to bring unbanked and
underbanked residents into the financial mainstream. With the goal of
helping families lay their financial foundation, the City of Atlanta will launch
its own program later this year-Bank On Atlanta. In partnership with local
financial institutions and community organizations, Bank On Atlanta will
provide practical financial skills that will enable residents and small
businesses to better manage their finances and plan for their future. We will
also provide increased access to low-cost personal and business accounts
and services, as well as ongoing, high quality financial education and one-
on-one individualized financial coaching.
23. Readability - Good Example
Welcome to Bank On Atlanta! Are you ready to learn how to better manage
your money? Do you want to own your own home or business? Do you
want to open your own bank account, in the easiest way possible? You’ve
come to the right place.
24. Readability
● 6.4% of companies had a score of 60 - 70 (8 - 9th
grade level)
● 12.8% had a score of 50 - 60 (10 - 12 grade level)
● 38.3% had a score of 30 - 50 (college level)
● 40.4% had a score of 0 - 30 (graduate school level)
● 2.1% had a negative score (unreadable)
28. Standards and Solutions
● The ARC should be easy to access from the
homepage
● Explain how products or services can be accessed
● The language used should be positive
● Should be written in a clear way
29. Good Organization and Design
● Clear navigation
● Accessible colors
● Clean layout
● Visual and semantic hierarchy
30. Additional Information
● Inclusive hiring
● Video tutorials
● Videos showing people with disabilities using their
products
● Survey opportunities
● Involvement in the disability community
● Research projects
● Sharing accessible coding
31. Addressing Flaws
● Designate responsibility for maintaining the ARC
● Regular maintenance
● Focus groups of users with disabilities
● Surveys of people using the ARC
Welcome everyone! Thank you for coming here, today to watch our presentation about Accessibility Statements and Resource Publishing Best Practices. Our research, last fall, involved studying different companies’ accessibility webpages to learn the best practices that can benefit us all. I will delve into the research part to discuss our findings, a little later. Instead of using the term “accessibility webpage”, I will be using “Accessibility Resource Center” or ARC. It is where a company publishes its accessibility statement, and content related to accessibility. It may be a single page or a series of pages.
Why is ARC important? It helps users to find different resources in one place. It is also an opportunity for companies to demonstrate their commitment to users with disabilities. Maybe you have come here and want to hear about how wonderful accessibility is and you don’t want to hear about marketing and public relations. But both of these are really important. Marketing allows you to show your products and services that are accessible and helps your company to maintain profitability, so that you are able to offer good products and services. And, sadly, more importantly, it will give your accessibility team support from other parts of your company. Public relations is good for more than one reason. It allows you to show your commitment to the disability community and it allows the people inside your company to become interested and inspired in becoming involved.
Also, it can help your company to avoid legal actions. As Lainey Feingold wrote, “I believe that posted accessibility pages help organizations avoid legal action - so long as there is an active phone number and email address and site visitors get prompt and positive responses to feedback….It’s absence a sign that accessibility is not a priority - or worse.” This brings us to the three most important things that you must have on your Accessibility Resource Center (ARC) webpage, which are:
https://www.lflegal.com/2013/02/access-info-pages/
Easy way to locate the ARC, has contact information, and has an accessibility statement.
Why is an accessibility statement important? Please understand that when I say “accessibility statement”, I am not referring to a “legal statement”, even though a number of ARCs have those, as well. An accessibility statement can be meaningful to a lot to users with disabilities. It is an opportunity for companies to show their commitment to make their products, websites, and services better for all, and also that they’re being considerate of our needs. Looking at an ARC webpage without an accessibility statement versus looking at an ARC webpage with an accessibility statement provokes a different reaction. A user who has a disability and has encountered a problem with a product or service and wants to contact the company will feel more positively towards the company, if they see that the company has stated that they have a goal of being accessible, because this sends the message that the company is working towards that, even if they haven’t yet achieved full accessibility in all of their products and services. An ARC without an accessibility statement shows us that they have different priorities.
Delving further in our research, we chose 56 companies that have a daily impact on people in the United States, and we broke them down into five sectors, which are technology, e-commerce, finance, transportation, and education. Having a variety of sectors helped us to examine different approaches they use with their ARCs and to see if any specific sector can benefit other sectors, as well. We won’t cover every detail of our research, because it definitely would bore you...and me, as well! We will only focus on the most significant findings.
49 out of 56 companies have ARCs. 43 had accessibility statements, and 36 of them were legible.
After looking at a number of accessibility statements, we went on to explore all of their ARCs to see what’s and not beneficial. We found some flaws.
Let’s back up, for a moment. Remember Lainey Feingold talked about the importance of having contact information on your ARC? 45 out of 49 ARCs listed their contact information. I will be providing two different examples for comparison.
Here’s a bad example. There’s one webpage that mentioned that there was contact information below. And there was nothing below. Not joking. Also, some webpages were not user friendly about how you access the contact information. For example, on the first page says that to find contact information, click here. Clicking there takes you to page two. The second page says the same thing, then the third page says the same thing, and, finally, the fourth page says we can contact them through this phone number. The worst part is that the phone number was a general phone number, which means calling them would not get you to someone who could directly help you with an accessibility issue, but you would need multiple more steps to reach to the right person.
Some other ARCs did a much better job of providing their contact information. This one is my favorite. There is not just one option to contact them, but four different ways to contact them! With “Accessibility Support” on the top of the contact information list, this makes them look friendlier and more supportive than many other companies. Some other companies would just have “contact information with a phone number.”
This is really an amazingly nice contact section, offering a variety of options; however, to be honest, I am going to make a suggestion. Add an email address as a contact option.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/accessibility/disability-answer-desk
Mel Baggs is an advocate for people with disabilities. She uses a speech synthesizer to communicate, and the process can be slow, as she types with one finger. She spends a great deal of time preparing her presentations, and, until the advent of automatic captioning, she captioned them, herself. When determining how users will contact your company, you need to consider the broadest range of accessibility in terms of contact. My assumption, and it is only an assumption, is that email would be the smoothest way for her to contact a company, as she would not be constrained by issues of time. But, I may be wrong.
People often assume I prefer to use video-relay, because I am deaf, but I actually prefer live chat . So, this is just an assumption. But, again, the more options you provide, the better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz289wSwDpM
All of the companies in our study have a home page. Often you would be able to locate their ARC from their homepage. 31 of the 49 companies with an ARC had a link to the ARC from their homepage. Another way to find it is through search engine (google, bing, yahoo, etc.) Sometimes, I would find three different links to three different ARCs for one company. The first link would be obsolete, then the second one would be unfinished, and then the third one is the current one. This is not helpful, when there is an issue and a user is trying to locate the company’s ARC in order to contact the company. This is the kind of flaw that companies need to check for, so that users can find the correct link.
Probably, you remember a game called The Sims. It was very popular, when I was growing up. Sometimes, people constructed houses without doors. The characters would be stuck inside or outside of the houses. In this case, the character is stuck inside and therefore spent a lot of time practicing the piano. If you develop an ARC and you do not make it easy to locate, you have basically made a house without a door. You have put all kinds of good resources inside in the house; and people who need to access them will have to find a window and climb up and get into the house that way, because you didn’t provide easy access.
https://www.pcgamesn.com/sims-4/sims-4-i-trapped-man-box-and-forced-him-learn-play-piano
Earlier, we mentioned that there were some legibility issues across different ARCs.
Let’s start with the bad examples, some of the ARCs overlapped pictures with words. Thankfully, none of the ARCs used cursive, but it’s just an example of bad legibility. Unfortunately, there were some extremely small fonts that I couldn’t even read with my glasses on. Imagine providing that to users with low vision specifically as your company’s accessibility website?
With good examples, the font size is appropriate and the color contrast follows accessibility standards. Only 36 accessibility statements were legible, which means that 7 or 16% were not legible.
https://www.apple.com/accessibility/
Another example; some of the videos on the ARCs were captioned. Great, that’s accessible, but the ironic part is that the font size was too small on some, making them impossible to read, which means they are not truly accessible. Please understand this example is not an exaggeration, but is accurate in terms of the size of the font that was used. This is not a legibility issue, but another, connected accessibility issue that is even sadder. Some videos were not even captioned. Again, of all the places on a website to have videos that are not captioned, there is a special irony in putting them up on the ARC.
https://pxhere.com/en/photo/1446501
Legibility and readability are two different things. Legibility has to do with visibility, or what you see, while readability is based on reading level and how clearly something is written.
In the US, the average reading level for adults is between 7-8th grade level, but the comfortable level for them to read at is 5-6th grade level. This is because people do not want to be constantly struggling to read if it’s on their level, and they feel more confident reading things that are presented below their reading level. Now, think about people with disabilities and their reading levels. Some of us read above, at, or below the average reading level. There are more barriers for us while growing up, which lessens our opportunity to advance our reading levels. People with traumatic brain injury, concussion, cognitive disability, and/or learning disability struggle more when reading. Literacy issues strongly affect the deaf and hard of hearing population. Most of us barely read at a 4th grade level. Word choice, paragraph length, and complexity of sentences are all important to consider when presenting information on your ARC.
There are different tools for measuring readability. We used Flesch Reading Ease score, because it is mostly commonly used in different research fields, including education and government.
https://medium.freecodecamp.org/reading-accessibility-82d24841ac7e
I want to express how grateful I am to Dr. Faith Wallace who wrote an amazing article about why accessibility is no good if readability is poor. I have linked the article so you can read it, later. She gave a comparison between a good example and a bad example of readability. The example was too lengthy to present on one slide, so I have only copied the first part of the passage.
Why is it difficult to read for readers who prefer to read 5-6th grade level? Clearly, this passage is above 5-6th grade level. The sentences are too long. Also, there’s a lot of fancy words. When preparing materials to be presented on an ARC, you need to think of who will be using the website and that you want it to be friendly for them to use. You may have to explain to the marketing department that the ARC is not a place to show off your use of technical jargon, the fact that you remember all of the words you studied to prepare to take the SAT, or how much you adore William Faulkner.
https://medium.freecodecamp.org/reading-accessibility-82d24841ac7e
This short paragraph provides the same point as the previous slide, but it is more straightforward, has shorter sentences, and no fancy words. This is what the content on an ARC should look like. It should be readable.
https://medium.freecodecamp.org/reading-accessibility-82d24841ac7e
This was the most startling part for me while doing the research, only 6.4% of the companies had a score of 60 - 70, which is between an 8-9th grade level. The rest of the companies required a higher level of reading comprehension. This means not one of the companies’ ARCs was actually readable. We need to ask ourselves some questions: Why did this happen? What is the point of having an ARC if it is not readable? For whose benefit were these written and posted? If you are truly committed to accessibility, you need to make an ARC with good readability.
Content is a big part of an ARC. I will tell you why.
I love movies. I enjoy movies because of the complexity of plot, character development, creativity, and sometimes they make you see things differently. I will tell you a true story. I happened to meet a person who told me that he really liked this movie that he saw, recently. I became curious and asked why he liked it. He answered, “Because it was good.” I was, of course, unsatisfied with the answer because it did not really answer my question. I tried, again, inquiring, “Okay...but why was it good?” He thought about it for a moment, then shrugged and replied, “I don’t know. I just thought it was good. I remember enjoying the movie.” This answer left me feeling stumped, because it gave me no real information. I had no idea if it was actually a good movie, or not. This is exactly how I look at an ARC webpage without content. A user might have positive feelings about the accessibility statement, but would not have any good information about a company’s products or services. This makes the user feels that they should probably go ahead and use another company’s’ products or services because another company has provided more information about how accessible their products and services are. And, incidentally, this is a really good movie.
https://www.theyoungfolks.com/film/91434/enjoy-the-little-things-stranger-than-fiction-10-years-later/
This is a really good example of plentiful content. How to get information is presented in a straightforward way under the heading of “Find Guides and Resources”. The information in each category is substantial and it will take hours and hours to read all of it. This content is specifically geared towards accessibility and helps users to see more reasons why they should use this company’s products.
What would be good standards and solutions when creating or modifying an ARC? The ARC should be easy to access from the homepage. This is the real estate equivalent of location, location, location. It should provide more examples on how products or services can be accessed. Not all of the ARCs have this information. The language used should be positive. We saw several words that should not be used. From our findings, “when requesting an interpreter to assist deaf student…”, the word “assist” is not the right word to use. Deaf people do not use interpreters because they need assistance. They use interpreters because they need access to communication. Also, readability is important. ARCs should be written in a clear way and be easy to understand.
We also can’t forget about good organization and design. To find things requires clear navigation. Contrast colors need to be accessible. Good organization and design also includes considering having a clean layout with ample space between elements and consider the guidelines for visual and semantic hierarchy. The ARC should not be the poor step-child of the website, with no thought, attention or effort paid to these elements.
Some of the companies went further than the minimum requirements. This was wonderful because you can see the companies showed, with this effort, a greater level of support for and commitment to people with disabilities. I would highly encourage, when developing or modifying an ARC, including more additional information, such as inclusive hiring, video tutorials, videos showing people with disabilities using their products, survey opportunities, information about the company’s involvement in the disability community, information about their different research projects, and information for software engineers looking to improve their coding to be more accessible.
To address flaws, when setting up an ARC, companies need to designate responsibility for maintaining it. Regular maintenance could reduce errors in content, design, and organization. Doing focus groups of users with disabilities also increases the experience quality. Collecting surveys of people using the ARC would also lead to insights as to what works well and what needs to be corrected or added.
I am sure you remember the scourge of computer users in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. I am talking about the pop-ups that would take over your screen and which you would have to battle to get rid of. I want to leave you with a very important pop-up message that I hope that you will not get rid of, but will consider when setting up and maintaining your company’s ARC. Is your ARC truly accessible?