Sarah Butt - sign name "ready"’s Post

View profile for Sarah Butt - sign name "ready", graphic

Registered British Sign Language Interpreter, Integrative Counsellor and Coach, and Professional Supervisor

There's some really fabulous content available to us all through LinkedIn (and other social media sites) and I can see so much effort, creativity and hard work going in to creating a wealth of material. This is just your reminder to please make your content accessible. - Ensure that your content is accessible to the 1 in 7 people in the UK who are deaf or hard of hearing by creating captions for your content. Automatic captioning is never 100% accurate and can appear in difficult formats that make it tiring to try and follow. - Captions can also massively benefit anyone with any auditory processing difficulty, for example many neurodiverse people. Captions can also help anyone who has English as an additional language, not their native language. - Do also include alt text for your photos and graphics, and audio description to videos as well. You are already doing so much work, this just ensures that absolutely 100% of your audience are able to access it. It might take a little bit of extra time, and there might be a learning curve at first, but there are lots of fantastic apps and tools to help you make accessible content. It might mean that you create one or two fewer pieces of content, but you know that everything you put out is fully accessible. If you are in any doubt there are many fantastic disabled access consultants who can bring their expertise plus lived experience to bear on access solutions. By NOT making content accessible, you are letting some of your audience know that you do not want or value their business or custom. Remember, even if you think someone might not be your end user or consumer that doesn't mean they aren't involved in commissioning or purchase, and your assumption about what someone might want to access could be wrong. But more than the business or commerce side of this, why are we still producing material that we know excludes people?

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