When you’re building a communications strategy, you need to consider your audience and employees at the same time. If you have employees with disabilities, you need to ensure that you provide them with ideal conditions to complete their tasks successfully. On the other hand, you might not be aware that some of your clients or members of the target audience have a disability. After all, not every disability is noticeable or visible to others at one glance. Therefore, you should make your strategy inclusive to allow others to engage with your content without any obstacles. Our tips will help you to understand what you need to do to make comms strategies more accessible and why it’s so important.
Include multiple perspectives—and make sure you use the right terminology
When trying to convey a message, you need to make sure you’re clear and use the right language. And if you’re trying to target your communication strategy at people with disability, you need to ensure that you’re using correct terminology. To make your communication more accessible, incorporate a wider point of view and opt for various voices. At the same time, you should research and see what kind of terminology you should avoid and how you can make the audience engage with the communication. You might also want to bring people with disability to your team and discuss what you can do to make people in a similar situation make feel heard and understood. Through research and feedback from others, you might be able to make your communication more accessible and prevent any unpleasant situations that might get you in trouble.
Create strategic hashtags for more impact
Bringing your communication efforts online can be very effective. You can make your copy easier to navigate with formatting and utilise emojis to make your message more engaging. And if you want your post to reach even more people, it’s vital that you choose the right hashtag. To stand out from the crowd, you might even create a hashtag specifically for your campaign and allow the audience to engage with the content even further. But if you’re not careful, hashtags might become unclear, and people might even mispronounce them. Then, all your efforts might go in vain. So, when you’re coming up with the hashtags you’d like to include in your post, try capitalizing the first letter of every word in the hashtag. That might help you to prevent misunderstanding and make your strategy more successful.
Add subtitles to videos
To make the most out of your efforts, you might want to leverage the benefits of using a video format in your strategy. Some people find it easier to learn and focus on highly visual content that tells a story. But if audience members have hearing problems, they might not be able to understand the message you’re trying to convey. To make your videos more accessible for your target audience, make sure that you add subtitles. That way, you could make it easier for people with a disability to engage with your content. At the same time, subtitles might be helpful for those who can’t watch your videos with a sound on. So, even though they can’t listen to your message, they might be able to interact with your content seamlessly.
Add descriptions and alt text to images
When you want to make your content more accessible to the audience, you should consider adding image descriptions and alt text. If there is a situation when an image on your website doesn’t load, the alt text could briefly describe what the image looked like. In the image description, you should go into more detail and describe things like:
- Colours
- Text
- Style of the image
- Names of people in the image
- Placement of objects in the frame
- Links
So, if your audience is using a screen reader, it should be able to pick up both alt text and image description and help the readers to engage with your content with fewer issues.
Engage with—and act on—the feedback your receive
To make your communications strategy as accessible as possible, you should always look for feedback. If you’re looking to make your strategy more friendly to people with a disability, you should ask them about their opinion. That might help you define what parts of your current strategy are working and if there is anything you need to improve. If you already have some ideas on where you’d like to move your communications in the future, you should gather feedback and use it to refine your ideas before you put them into action.
Boost accessibility with different document formats
Written communications might be difficult to consume and navigate for those who have Dyslexia, low vision, blindness or low literacy levels. So, when you’re interacting with people in a chat or writing a letter or an email, you need to ensure that the readers don’t struggle. While you’re developing a comms strategy, you might need to send documents to others. To make sure that people with a disability can interact with the document, try to provide alternative formats that might be more accessible. If you’re not sure where to start, get in touch with AbleDocs, a top accessibility company that can help you to create accessible PDF documents and teach you how to implement accessibility practices into your future documents and online presence. That way, you might be able to avoid any miscommunication and make the readers of the document feel more appreciated.
Make accessibility and inclusion the focus of your strategy
If you want to bring a real difference into your comms strategy, you should make accessibility and inclusion the center of your attention. With every piece of content that you produce, there is always something you can do to push your efforts further and engage with a wider audience. So, take the opportunity and publish content that makes your audience feel appreciated, understood and heard. Even though it might seem difficult in the beginning, you will find that it gets easier as you go. While it requires a lot of effort from your side, it could make your company even more successful and push you closer to the top.
