Easy Steps to Accessibility

On June 6, 2008, Lois Johnson, Lisa Gayhart and I went to the OLITA Digital Odyssey at the new Canadian National Institute for the Blind Library in Toronto.

This year's theme was accessibility -- very timely, because by 2010, all public sector organizations -- including RWL -- must have customer service standards and policies in place. For example, how will we accommodate children with visual disabilities in storytime programs, how will we alert them beforehand about any barriers they might encounter, how will we train staff -- tonnes to think about! No wonder the event was sold out!

The good news is some barriers are easy to remove. Karen McCall, who lives in Paris, Ontario, and who I met on the subway going to the conference, told us how simple it is to create barrier-free documents.

Simply add alt text for the images you use in PowerPoint slides, and use placeholders instead of adding in text boxes to your slides. Then screen readers can make sense of them.

In Word documents, create a template, and use headings and styles (the Format menu on your toolbar) instead of bolding and italicizing words as you go along.
>Reason: Screen readers can't pick out the format codes.
A screen reader would read this sentence as
"a bold screen reader regular would italics read bold italics this italics sentence regular as"
Now, wouldn't that drive you crazy!!

The Keynote Speaker was awesome! Entertaining, informative and myth-busting, John Draper of Together We Rock challenged us to put people first, not the disability. He had lots of humorous stories about his life as a non-verbal person relying on adaptive technology (a symbol board, screen readers, voice synthesizers) to communicate. Some stories were poignant, some just made you downright mad! Click here for a sample click from his presentation.

My favourite quote from John's presentation was one he borrowed from Gary Bunch:
"You learn to include by including".
I hope that will inspire all of us at RWL as we work towards inclusivity.