Is your website accessible?

Photo by scarydan

With all the amazing conferences, trainings, webinars, and workshops it’s hard to attend them all. When I miss one, I will often look to the conference website for session handouts and presentations to see what I missed. Last week was the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits Technology Conference, and one of the sessions there was about ensuring your organization is web-accessible. This is rarely discussed, but it extremely important when you take a moment to consider the numbers.

• More than 25 million Americans report experiencing significant vision loss.
• About 30 percent of the population over age 60 has a vision loss not corrected by glasses.
• 1 in 3 people over the age of 60 has a hearing loss. By the age of 80, 1 in 2 will have a hearing loss.
• 10% of the population is estimated to be deaf, hard of hearing, or deafblind. In 30 years, this group is expected to double in size.

So, what can you do?

Start by checking out this website to see how a screen reader would view your website.

Then, make some of the changes (resizable text, good text contrast, captions, etc) suggested in this handout from the conference session.

Here, here, and here are the handouts from the session on accessibility that were used in writing this blog post.

To access downloads from the conference (presentations, handouts, etc) click here.