AVO agency

View Original

Become a Content Accessibility Champion

Veronica Camara

Practical ways that writers can serve as champions for web content accessibility

Accessible content enables people of all abilities and backgrounds to use, understand and interact with your content. Content that is not accessible if it excludes people, plain and simple. So whether you identify as a copywriter, content writer, technical writer, UX writer, or content marketer, accessibility should be a part of your work. 

Chances are, you’re reading this because accessibility is new to you. Welcome! 

In this article, I’ll be sharing 3 practical ways that you can start to incorporate and prioritize accessibility in your work, in a way that doesn’t feel forced or incompatible with your current workflow. I’ll also link you to some more tactical accessibility guidelines at the end here. 

1. Cultivate curiosity and listening skills

Reading this is a great first step. You’re curious. You want to learn and understand. That’s amazing, because you need to stay curious to become a great digital advocate for marginalized populations. 

Any random question you have about accessibility or the people it empowers, dive into that question. Research it, ask more questions, talk about it with colleagues, and keep digging even when it might feel uncomfortable. 

And let me tell you, for those of us who hold a lot of privilege, sometimes digging into our accessibility questions will get uncomfortable. You might find yourself thinking in circles like….

Do blind people use smart phones? How does that work? Wait, is “blind people” okay to say? Is this an offensive question? Oh crap.

Friend. LEAN IN to that fear! Be prepared to be get things wrong sometimes, to learn, and to do better, and to keep at it. Questions like that can lead you to meaningful new information, like discussions about person-first vs identity-first language.

What’s important is that you stay open to new information. Cultivate your listening skills as you go, because building empathy for people whose lives are different from ours is important. 

2. Call people in to learn with you

Most of us don’t work in a vacuum. As content people, we work with other people, whether they are colleagues at our full-time jobs or clients we work with as consultants. 

As you learn more about web accessibility, you’ll quickly find—like I have—that a surprising amount of people who work on interfaces don’t know much about it. 

What we can do, as writers, is help spark their curiosity in the accessibility by “calling people in” instead “calling people out.” Here’s what that might look like…

Calling out: Hey Sofia, this design you sent me is totally not accessible. The contrast is way off and you are excluding people with low vision. We need to change it ASAP.

Calling in: Hey Sofia! I’ve been learning about digital accessibility lately, and I noticed the contrast on this page on doesn’t meet WCAG standards. Could we work on this together? 

It might sound obvious or silly, but accessibility improvements are truly a team effort. The more you can get other people involved, the better. It can also be a great way to learn from each other, learn with each other, and just bond as a team. 

3. Incorporate accessibility into your workflow holistically

One of the things I do in my web accessibility workshops is help teams reimagine their workflow through an accessible, inclusive lens.

The biggest mistake I see organizations make when it comes to accessibility is approaching it as a checklist at the end of a workflow. The “we made a whole website, now let’s see if it’s accessible” approach. 

That doesn’t work. It’s just plain ineffective, although often well intentioned.

Instead of trying to come up with a lengthy accessibility checklist, or set of guidelines that lives largely unnoticed in your team’s Google Drive, think about your workflow instead. Ask, what are the general steps or phases we go through when we work on something? How can we be a bit more inclusive at each phase?

Here’s what that might look like.

If you’re a manager, you could make sure to stack your team with diverse perspectives, abilities and backgrounds. Then you could add in accessibility education into new employee onboarding or continuing education.

If your team does some version of a research or discovery phase, you could think of ways to make your research include talking to and learning from marginalized populations—not just your “normal” users. Same concept would apply to user testing.

The goal is to change the way you work, not to continue creating inaccessible experiences and then haphazardly backtrack later.

Web content accessibility resources 

I hope the suggestions so far were helpful! Here are some great resources to help you kickstart your journey to becoming an accessibility champion.

Foundational reads:

Guidelines and tools:

Videos and talks: