Welcome to Disability:IN’s monthly round up of digital accessibility news for July. At Disability:IN we know that digital accessibility impacts all aspects of disability inclusion. If you have questions about our digital accessibility program, please contact Jeff Wissel, our Chief Accessibility Officer.
Disability:IN Annual Global Conference and Expo
July 17th – 21st is the Disability:IN Annual Conference in Dallas Texas. While in-person attendance is sold out virtual attendance registration is still available.
Accessibility Breakout Sessions
The following five sessions are featured in the Accessibility track:
- Tuesday, July 19th 10:00 A.M.-11:15 A.M. Building and Maintaining a Sustainable Digital Accessibility Framework Across The Enterprise (This session will be both in-person and virtual)
- Tuesday, July 19th 1:30 P.M.-2:45 P.M Procurement Accessibility: Essential Building Blocks for Disability-Inclusive Procurement and Supplier Diversity
- Tuesday, July 19th 1:30 P.M.-2:45 P.M Practical Guidance for Inclusive & Accessible Marketing and Communications
- Wednesday, July 20th 1:30 P.M.-2:45 P.M Building Accessibility Culture, Awareness, and Action: Accessibility Labs, Hackathons, Champion Programs, and Accessibility
- Wednesday, July 20th 3:00 -4:15 PM Digital Inclusion and Emerging Technologies in the Evolving Work and Customer Environments
Accessibility Plenary
The Accessibility Plenary – Accessibility: The Key to Unlocking Innovation – will be held on Tuesday, July 19, 11:30am – 1:10pm. It will be both in-person and part of the virtual conference
During the Plenary Disability:IN’s Chief Accessibility Officer Jeff Wissel will announce a global campaign regarding procurement accessibility. Stay tuned for more details on this global initiative.
Another highlight of the Plenary is a fireside chat between Microsoft Chief Accessibility Officer and Oscar winning actor Marlee Matlin. Here’s what Jenny posted about this on LinkedIn.
Accessibility Leadership Committee
On July 18, 2022 the Disability:IN Digital Accessibility Leadership Committee will meet in-person during the Annual Conference. Disability:IN is thrilled to welcome Monica Goel, Executive Director, Digital Accessibility Engineering CVS Health, as a Co-Chair of the Committee. She joins Sam Latif, Company Accessibility Leader at Procter & Gamble, and Amy Warner, VP & GM, IT Digital Business Solutions and Corporate Director of Accessibility, Intel Corporation, as leaders of this globally diverse group of business leaders committed to accessibility. Read more about the Digital Accessibility Leadership Committee.
Other Digital Accessibility News from Disability:IN
With over 90 members from 54 corporate partner companies, Disability:IN’s Reasonable Accommodation Working Group, launched in April, is off to a great start. The working group offers a peer networking forum for sharing knowledge, strategies, and best practices to help organizations develop, enhance and maintain their reasonable accommodations policies and programs. Members are currently working on enhancing a reasonable accommodations guidebook that will be shared upon completion with all Disability:IN corporate partners. The working group has two meetings for the remainder of the year. If you are interested in joining the Reasonable Accommodations Working Group, please contact Mylene Padolina. She will forward the invitation for the next meeting scheduled on September 21 from 2pm-3pm EDT and will also provide information from previous meetings.
Digital Accessibility Information and Resources
The Disability:IN digital accessibility team knows that the amount of accessibility resources can be overwhelming. Each month we share just a few of the many free resources from our Resource Library, our blog, our partners or other sources that we think are great. Don’t forget to explore the Disability:IN Resource Library where you can filter resources by “accessibility” and find content created by Disability:IN and our partners.
Here are some resource suggestions for this month. If you are a Disability:IN partner and would like your accessibility resources featured in our monthly roundup, please let us know at [email protected].
6 Accessibility Basics Cause 97% of Errors
We found this article by web developer and consultant Joseph Dolson to be very insightful. Here’s a sample from the article linked above. Read the full article to discover the common errors.
“I repeatedly encounter the same six issues when evaluating a website’s accessibility, as do most consultants. I’d like to imagine a world where companies clean up most accessibility glitches in-house and hire consultants only to solve highly technical problems. Alas, many companies struggle with implementing the basics. Addressing the six common errors below solves many accessibility snafus, greatly helping vision-impaired users.”
“All IN” Toolkit at Cannes
Nearly 15% of the world’s population experiences some form of disability – yet historically, the portrayal of people with disabilities in marketing has rendered them all but invisible. Disability:IN partnered with Google to launch “All In” – an accessible marketing playbook.
And what better place to introduce these insights than at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, where a key theme this year is representing the underrepresented in creative work. Google is the first official accessibility partner of Cannes Lions and they are working with Cannes to make sure the Festival itself is built for people with disabilities.
“We’re so proud to participate in this inclusive marketing toolkit. Companies that make sure disability is culturally represented will see stronger outcomes, better ideas and outsized brand fit. What’s more, disability reaches other dimensions of diversity making it a truly intersectional demographic.” – Jill Houghton, President & CEO, Disability:IN
PowerPoint Live Features
Microsoft Teams and Office 365 now provides the ability for screen readers to read aloud slide content when the PowerPoint Live feature is activated. This new feature provides screen reader users the ability to participate in PowerPoint presentations in ways not possible before!
- Using a screen reader in PowerPoint Live
- How to share your slides in PowerPoint Live
Increased Accessibility of HR Certification
Late June brought news of a legal settlement between deaf and hard of hearing human resource (HR) professionals and the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) designed to ensure that deaf HR professionals have access to SHRM’s certification, courses and other programming. Read the press release about the settlement.
News about the Disability:IN Digital Accessibility Team
Disability:IN’s Chief Accessibility Officer Jeff Wissel was a panelist at the Foundation Fighting Blindness annual conference in June. The topic was How To Level Up Your Life With Technology.
