Communication, Marketing and Digital Accessibility.
Image: A woman who is vision impaired wears a light green shirt and sits in a library, using a mobile phone.
Since the Access Inclusion and Employment Plan's (AIEP or the Plan) launch, teams across Life Without Barriers have diligently worked towards creating a more inclusive and accessible workplace and improving employment opportunities for people with disability.
We are excited to share our progress on our 2022-2025 AIEP.
Communication and Marketing
Ensure our brand and design standards are accessible and inclusive
We released an updated Life Without Barriers Style Guide in August 2023. Our marketing materials meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 level AA conformance and inclusive print design standards. The Guide makes deliberate and conscious style choices to ensure inclusive digital and print design and legibility. From our colours and fonts to writing style and imagery, we want to ensure that everything we produce promotes inclusive participation and access to information for all people.
We have implemented a digital briefing board so that all marketing materials go through a design and review process, including at least one round of accessibility checks.
Ensure our communications are accessible and inclusive
The Accessibility Hub and Inclusive Language Intranet pages guide all employees on accessible and inclusive communication, digital accessibility, and meeting and event accessibility.
We updated our corporate email signature to meet accessibility guidelines and added a new ‘Accessibility’ field for people to share their access requirements. The Email Signature Procedure provides guidelines for adding alt text, updating font styles, and examples of accessibility requirements.
Members of our Communications and Marketing teams completed Vision Australia’s Accessible Communication and Marketing Training in early 2023.
We established an Easy English working group to develop and implement consistent Easy English training, guidelines, and resources across Life Without Barriers. Easy English resources, including templates and an icon library, are available on our Intranet to assist employees in creating Easy English documents.
Ensure the accessibility of our Intranet and social media content
The Life Without Barrier Intranet uses SharePoint Online, which meets WCAG 2.0 level AA guidelines.
To improve Intranet content accessibility, we include writing for the web and accessibility training in Intranet Page Editor training sessions. Accessibility and writing for the web resources are available on the Intranet Support page.
We released a Social Media Accessibility Guide in early 2023. For external posts, we include captioning on all videos, image descriptions on all photos, no complicated graphics, and documents produced in an accessible format, including Easy English where appropriate.
Image: A young woman with long brown hair, wearing a green t-shirt, sits in a wheelchair and smiles at the camera whilst holding her mobile phone.
Digital Accessibility
Develop a Digital Accessibility Statement
We developed a publicly accessible Digital Accessibility Statement, which affirms Life Without Barriers’ commitment to digital accessibility, outlines technical specifications and known limitations, and provides options for complaints and feedback. The Life Without Barriers website is partially conformant with WCAG 2.1 level AA. Partially conformant means that some content parts do not fully conform to the accessibility standard. We test pages through automatic front-end tests and use Monsido for additional testing in areas with front-end testing limitations.
We are proud of our continued progress toward a more inclusive and accessible workplace.
This article is part four of a series, you can read the other articles via the links below:
