By: Molly, Office of Accessibility Intern

It sits next to doors, a few feet off the ground, and usually is silver with a blue design in the center. Can you guess what the item is? An automatic door switch! An automatic door switch is a common sight in the physical world, but what resources exist to help people with disabilities in the digital world?

Hello! My name is Molly, I am an intern for the Office of Accessibility, and I can start to answer that question. Laws, regulations, and guidelines – from the state, federal, and even international level – all regulate digital accessibility. There are:

• Section 508; requires that people with disabilities and those without can access technology in a comparable manner.
• Americans with Disabilities Act; prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities in all areas of public life.
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG); aims to create a single shared web standard for accessibility that meets everyone’s needs.
• Digital Accessibility and Usability Law; requires the Executive branch agencies in the State of Minnesota to follow the State Accessibility Standard.

Together, these provide the rules for digital accessibility, albeit in a dry, dusty way that involves lots of big words.

So, how do average people like me start to make digital things accessible? I found that answer in the styles pane of Microsoft Word.

You know the styles pane, right?

If you’re like me, it’s likely gathering dust at the top of every Word document. Turns out, it is actually very helpful in making a document accessible. Instead of increasing the size of your font to identify sections, use heading styles. You can use list styles Instead of manually inserting dashes or symbols for bullets.

These (and other strategies) not only visually structure your document, they also help assistive technology (AT) users navigate documents too!

Assistive technology, or AT, as mentioned above, helps people with disabilities navigate the world. Those automatic door switches from the introduction are an example of AT. Other examples include:

• Speech to text software (such as Dragon Naturally Speaking)
• Captions or transcripts for video/audio recordings
• Screen readers (such as JAWS)
  • Screen readers are software that convey to people with low vision what is on a display, using non-sighted methods.

Assistive technologies are all jolly well and good, but why does that matter to you, if you don’t use them? Let’s circle back to the automatic door switches. Now, pretend that all the doors you’d ever need to open have handles based on someone who is seven feet tall and you are only five feet tall. You would probably never be able to open doors without the help of handy dandy automatic door switches. Now, those door switches would positively affect you, and the switches wouldn’t negatively affect the seven-foot-tall people—they might even help if they have their hands full and need to open a door.

AT for digital media works under the same principle. It doesn’t hurt to use headings or add alternative text – it only helps all users navigate the document, regardless of how they access it.

There are business and economic benefits as well. I’ve heard grumbles that, “You have to install the automatic door switch and that costs time and money.” Well, an American Institute for Research report on the purchasing power of people with disabilities found that the disposable income (after-tax money at your disposal) for working-age people with disabilities is about $490 billion – which is similar to that of other important markets, such as African Americans ($501 billion) and Hispanics ($582 billion). The report also found that the discretionary income (money for nonessential items) for working-age people with disabilities is around $21 billion dollars – a larger number than the African-American and Hispanic markets combined. This means that people with disabilities have money to spend. Corporations that do not make their content accessible are missing a large market. So, if you install the automatic door opener in your café, people with disabilities that couldn’t get into your business before will now eat there, and that leads to profit. The same principal works for digital media: the more accessible you make your content, the more traffic it will receive.

You may be thinking, how does implementing digital accessibility practices help someone who doesn’t own a business or manage web content? Learning about accessibility practices and applying them gives you useful skills that translate to other jobs and other areas of life. For example, you can apply accessibility practices to slides for presentations or add your accessibility qualifications on your resume.

On a broader scale, teaching people at a young age about accessibility, and encouraging accessibility best practices helps to normalize accessibility as a right, and makes everything a lot easier for AT users. Using accessibility practices from the beginning makes sure that individuals with disabilities do not have to work harder than people without disabilities to access the same information. It is difficult to suddenly incorporate accessibility practices into pre-existing structures that are not accessibility-friendly. That’s why it is important to teach accessibility practices to the young and upcoming workforce. Accessibility becomes integrated into the fabric of software, digital media, and the future.

When I leave this internship, I will have confidence in my ability to use accessibility best practices in all digital media that I create, from documents to slide shows. I will also know that I am contributing to the normalization of digital accessibility, in this increasingly digital world. Learn more:

• A Hidden Market: The Purchasing Power of Working-Age Adults with Disabilities
• MNIT Office of Accessibility Electronic Documents