Online Accessibility Advice from ACCESS Speakers

ACCESS is an event for the accessibility enthusiast. Whether you already have a video accessibility initiative at your organization or not, you’ll leave empowered, motivated, and prepared to create a more universally accessible world.

We dove into ACCESS 2019’s library of presentations featuring legal-rebel Lainey Feingold, researchers from USFSP, and Hubspot’s accessibility leaders. Here’s some of their advice for prioritizing accessibility at your organization.

Lainey’s Advice for Hiring Accessibility Experts

In 2018, GNC was sued for lack of web accessibility. GNC hired an “accessibility expert,” but it quickly became clear that this individual was not an expert. GNC lost their early efforts in the case, which could have been avoided if they vetted their experts beforehand.

Lainey’s advice for avoiding a situation like this is to always evaluate at least two vendors and to treat them as you would any other contract.

USFSP’s Advice for Helping All Students Benefit from Captioning

The USFSP research study on the impact of closed captioning and the interactive transcript in the classroom, highlights the importance of closed captioning for all students in an online learning environment.

Participants in the study noted three benefits of interactive transcripts:

• 38% of the interactive transcript group participants said that the tool helped with information retention, similarly to captions
• 29% said that they used the tool as a study guide
• 29% said that the tool helped them to find information

If you want to maximize the use of closed captioning tools in the classroom, USFSP experts advise institutions to provide an orientation for students to learn about the benefits and use of tools like the interactive transcript.

Hubspot’s Advice for Successfully Centralizing Accessibility

As you begin to centralize accessibility efforts in your organization, the accessibility team at Hubspot’s encourages organizations to focus on fostering communication. Your focus should be on making the people around you aware of accessibility so that it can create organic communication.

Hubspot utilizes Slack to maintain open communication between all teams in their organization. They have a dedicated #accessibility channel where anyone is free to post a question. Then, people with expertise can jump in and help try to answer it. This fosters constant and open communication within the company.

Hubspot also hosts working sessions where they present to the company on different elements of accessibility to help build awareness and educate staff.

Advice You Can Expect at ACCESS 2020

We are in the midst of planning our ACCESS 2020 event in Boston on September 17th. This year, we plan on having twice as many tracks and even more rockstar accessibility experts presenting on WCAG tips, getting buy-in, UDL, and so much more.

Get your ticket now at the Early Bird Discount Risk-Free!