How can you ensure accessibility across multiple platforms and channels for content management?

1 Why accessibility matters

Accessibility is not only a legal requirement, but also a moral and business responsibility. By making your content accessible, you can improve your user experience, reach a wider and more diverse audience, increase your customer loyalty and retention, enhance your brand reputation and social impact, and avoid potential lawsuits and penalties. Accessibility is also a key component of inclusive design, which aims to create content that respects and responds to the diversity of human needs and abilities. Inclusive design can help you create more innovative, relevant, and engaging content that benefits all users.

2 How to assess accessibility

Before you can improve your accessibility, you need to assess your current situation and identify any gaps or issues. To do this, you can use various tools and methods, such as accessibility checkers, user testing, and expert reviews. Accessibility checkers are software or online tools that scan your content and provide feedback on how well it meets the WCAG standards. User testing involves involving real users with different abilities and needs in testing your content and providing feedback on how easy or difficult it is to use. Expert reviews involve hiring or consulting accessibility experts or specialists who can review your content and provide recommendations on how to improve it.

3 How to implement accessibility

Once you have assessed your accessibility, you can start implementing the necessary changes and improvements to your content. Various strategies and techniques can be used to make your content more accessible, such as structuring it logically and consistently with headings, subheadings, lists, tables, and other elements. You can also use semantic markup and contrast, size, spacing, and alignment to make it readable and clear. Additionally, alt text, captions, transcripts, audio descriptions, labels, instructions, feedback, error messages, keyboard accessibility, focus indicators and skip links can be used to make your content understandable and usable by keyboard or assistive technologies.

4 How to maintain accessibility

Implementing accessibility is an ongoing process that requires regular monitoring and updating. You can use various practices and tools to maintain your accessibility, such as creating and documenting your accessibility policies, providing and participating in accessibility training sessions, workshops, webinars, or courses, and conducting periodic reviews and evaluations with accessibility checkers, user testing, or expert reviews to measure and improve your accessibility performance and compliance. Communicating these policies to your team and stakeholders is also important for ensuring that your content meets the accessibility requirements and expectations.

5 How to adapt to different platforms and channels

When creating and delivering content, you need to consider the accessibility features and challenges of each platform and channel. To adapt to different platforms and channels, you can use responsive design, cross-platform testing, and content optimization. Responsive design involves designing and developing content that automatically adjusts to different screen sizes, resolutions, and orientations. Cross-platform testing is the process of verifying your content on different platforms and channels to ensure it works and looks as intended. Content optimization entails enhancing and improving your content to suit the specific needs of different platforms and channels. This can include techniques such as compression, minification, caching, or lazy loading, as well as using formats like HTML, XML, JSON, or RSS.