Tips to make the news more accessible

By Patrick Garvin, independent journalist and accessibility consultant

I’ve spent more than four years speaking at journalism conferences and talking to newsrooms about making news sites more accessible to people with disabilities. When I speak with journalists about this, I rely on two sets of credentials: the accessibility certifications I’ve earned in the last four years, and the 15 years I spent working in newsrooms.

I find it important to establish that I understand the hectic nature of journalism. Most people at my training sessions agree that websites, digital files and apps should be accessible to disabled audiences. These journalists might not know the nuts and bolts of how to do that, but they don’t fight the concept. Where some struggle though, is how to bridge the gap between the chaos of a newsroom and the discipline of accessibility.

The solution is to build up the necessary skills and practice them so that accessibility is baked into the process. With practice on smaller projects or projects with longer deadlines, staffers can eventually deliver accessibility reliably on deadline. This is how journalists have treated a lot of new-to-them skills. The guru who can easily scrape data in Python and analyze it in R probably needed non-breaking news projects to learn how to do that. It is the same with the graphics staffer who taught herself AfterEffects or the designer who became a JavaScript whiz. The things they can do with ease now are things they had to learn with time.

The key is to get started and foster a culture of accessibility. That takes time and effort, but here are ways to make the starting process a little easier and smoother. Know how to find accessibility resources online Hashtags and search terms The hashtag #accessibility allows you to find many accessibility-related resources on X and LinkedIn. To find accessibility resources in Spanish, use the hashtag #accesibilidad. The hashtag #accessibilité helps you find resources in French. An important term to know is the numeronym a11y, which is meant as shorthand for “accessibility.” In this instance, the 11 stands for the 11 letters between “a” and “y.” The #a11y hashtag on X and LinkedIn can help you find articles, conversations and other resources you might not otherwise see. It is often pronounced “A-one-one-Y,” “A-eleven-Y ” and “ally.” Follow folks in the accessibility space on social media Using those hashtags, you can find accessibility enthusiasts on all sorts of sites, whether it’s X, Linkedin, Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads or one of the other social media platforms. Some experts have been working in accessibility for decades, and some newbies are wading in. While this section was not meant to be a plug for my social media accounts, I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you that I have Accessibility Awareness accounts on X, Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads — where I share tips in brief, digestible nuggets.

Know how to find accessibility resources online

Hashtags and search terms

The hashtag #accessibility allows you to find many accessibility-related resources on X and LinkedIn. To find accessibility resources in Spanish, use the hashtag #accesibilidad. The hashtag #accessibilité helps you find resources in French. An important term to know is the numeronym a11y, which is meant as shorthand for “accessibility.” In this instance, the 11 stands for the 11 letters between “a” and “y.” The #a11y hashtag on X and LinkedIn can help you find articles, conversations and other resources you might not otherwise see. It is often pronounced “A-one-one-Y,” “A-eleven-Y ” and “ally.”

Follow folks in the accessibility space on social media

Using those hashtags, you can find accessibility enthusiasts on all sorts of sites, whether it’s X, Linkedin, Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads or one of the other social media platforms. Some experts have been working in accessibility for decades, and some newbies are wading in. While this section was not meant to be a plug for my social media accounts, I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you that I have Accessibility Awareness accounts on X, Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads — where I share tips in brief, digestible nuggets.

Creating a culture of accessibility

Take advantage of team collaboration tools

If your organization has Slack, Teams or any other messaging program, you should have a dedicated accessibility channel. If one doesn’t exist, be proactive and create one. This is a great way for everyone on your team to learn together by sharing links, posing questions and reviewing alt text, among other things. If you’re a freelancer or an independent journalist, you won’t necessarily have access to a “team” Slack or Teams chat. However, there are a handful of journalism-centric Slack spaces, and many have channels for accessibility.

Talk about accessibility when possible

Get in the habit of bringing up accessibility at meetings, stand-ups and demos. Bring up things you’ve done to address accessibility, regardless of how small the efforts might be. Likewise, don’t be afraid to ask, “Have we tested this on a keyboard?” or “ What’s the color contrast on that?”

Be prepared to make the case for accessibility

Accessibility is the right thing to do. You probably wouldn’t have made it this far into the article if you didn’t believe that. I wish I could tell you that you wouldn’t have to persuade people that it’s the right thing to do, but unfortunately, some people need some help getting on board with accessibility.

Sheri Byrne-Haber’s “Giving A Damn About Accessibility” is a free e-book that has excellent tips on how to deal with people who challenge or dismiss the need for accessibility.

The pros and cons of the lawsuit angle

Some frame accessibility around the fear of lawsuits. One problem is that this approach decenters people with disabilities. Websites should be designed so people can use them. Designing a website just so it can pass a legal checklist violates the whole premise of accessibility.

That said, it is essential to know the accessibility laws in your area. Lainey Feingold is a disability rights lawyer who has spent decades focusing on making technology and information more accessible. On her website, she has resources on digital accessibility laws and policies that she’s updated over the years. Though not exhaustive, it has great insight, histories, explanations and links.

The fear of lawsuits can get companies to act, but it can get them to act in the wrong way. Beware of companies promising to make sites completely accessible, compliant and immune from lawsuits with just a few lines of code. This just isn’t possible. Disabled users have long said these tools don’t actually help them, and can often make things worse. More than 900 accessibility advocates and web developers have signed an open letter explaining these products’ limitations and dangers.

Without accessibility, DEI efforts are incomplete

The approach that tends to help many people get on board with accessibility is to frame it as an issue of inclusion rather than an issue of technology. The World Health Organization’s current estimate is that about 15% of the global population has a disability. That’s approximately 1.3 billion people worldwide.

The number of people with disabilities is not at all negligible. It’s a significant minority group, one that any of us could join at any time. If we live long enough, our chances of being disabled grow. Any organization that wants to think of itself as being inclusive has to recognize whether they are including or excluding such a large group of people. If a company is willing to create content, sites and apps that exclude that many people, do they have any credibility when talking about their own sense of diversity, equity and inclusion?

Addressing the technical challenges

Templates

For graphics teams and newsroom developers who work on special projects, it can be helpful to create templates or starter files for components you use a lot. For example, if you know your team uses a lot of tab lists or photo galleries, creating a template for any particular element could be helpful.

This can be updated as your team learns more about accessibility. The templates I have made for components and elements grew as I better understood assistive technologies and the people who use them. As I’ve dug into standards to be able to perform accessibility audits, my templates have been tweaked and updated to reflect my growing knowledge.

Checklists

Checklists can be helpful, but the key is to pay attention to them throughout the entire process. If you build a project and then look through a checklist of criteria, you’ll find you might have to rebuild certain things to meet that criteria. That ends up being time and money you don’t have. This is why people sometimes say accessibility is too time-consuming or too expensive. But it’s not the fault of accessibility. It’s the fault of the people who aren’t considering accessibility until after the fact.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

In an ideal setting, your newsroom would have a person whose sole role is accessibility, and they would work with the different departments on how to conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This person would be well-versed in the documentation and would be able to help developers, designers and others with the parts of WCAG that are crucial for that role.

I don’t think reporters or editors have to be experts on WCAG. UX/UI designers and developers in your organization need to have familiarity and need to know the basics.

WCAG is the basis of many laws worldwide. In April 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice announced an update to the Americans with Disabilities Act that will require state and local governments to conform to WCAG 2.1, Level AA. Depending on the size of the population, state and local governments have until April 2026 or April 2027 to comply.

If you work within higher education, you’ll likely want to learn more about how these ADA updates can affect you. Should a journalism professor dig in and learn all of the nitty-gritty details of WCAG? Not necessarily, because much of it will not pertain to anything a journalism professor can control. The professor can’t control how input fields and forms are formatted on their university’s website. That part of WCAG is very important to the folks who work on the website, but it won’t help teach students how to copy edit. What would help an editing professor are the parts of WCAG that speak to alt text, headings and other accessibility-related editing skills.

Conclusion

Your goal should be to start and maintain momentum. You’re going to make mistakes, which is how you learn. Some journalists give me the impression they think they can’t start incorporating accessibility until they understand all of it. But if we did not, none of us would have ever gotten started.

Think of election nights. Election night at every newsroom is a flurry of all sorts of shifting priorities, layered deadlines and breaking news. It’s something that newsrooms are able to do well because they have practice at it. Not just practice at covering elections, but practice handling the specific challenges of time management, writing on deadlines and pivoting quickly. In other words, very few (successful) election nights are run by throwing a bunch of newbies in there with no previous experience. Election nights are a time for journalists to shine and flex their muscles precisely because they have been growing and developing those muscles over time. The key is to start somewhere.