From the course: Digital Accessibility for the Modern Workplace

Accessibility best practices

From the course: Digital Accessibility for the Modern Workplace

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Accessibility best practices

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- You've assessed your personal accessibility approach to social media, and you've changed your email footer to an accessible template. You're familiar with the accessibility checker in office and you're ensuring that wherever possible, you share accessible collateral. You've reached out to your comms team and asked them to make some commitments to colleagues with disabilities, and to look at their public-facing collateral. Are we done? Not quite. The modern workplace is complex. You're surrounded by third-party software, business applications, SharePoints, intranets, CRMs, and websites. This can feel daunting, but you can make a difference. There are a number of readily available automated testing tools for accessibility. You can take a look at the accessibility of your own installed software, your biz apps and your website. We open sourced our testing tools recently. Take a look at this site here. aka.ms/AccessibilityInsights. It will tell you when color contrast doesn't meet regs. Invalid unlabeled links on buttons will be red-flagged. You can check tab order. It's really usable even if you don't write code and you can advocate for accessibility in your organization. But a quick warning. Automated tools do not guarantee usability. Nothing beats testing carried out by humans. Actually nothing beats testing by humans who need accessibility. These are organizations who employ people with disabilities to test for you. If you can find a budget for this, then please go this route. For years, digital accessibility has been the domain of the IT team. I would ask you to feel empowered to influence the accessibility of your workspace and the experience of your customers or service users. If you get feedback that something is inaccessible, advocate for change. And lastly, take this gem with you. If you don't know if something is accessible or not, it's not. Accessibility is a deliberate process, it will not happen by accident.

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