HOW TO MAKE YOUR CONFERENCE ACCESSIBLE – AND WHY YOU SHOULD CARE!

PRESENTATIONS

Accessibility can be improved in many ways during presentations.

INTERPRETERS

People who are Deaf or hard of hearing may require the assistance of a sign language interpreter to benefit from the presentations. Hiring interpreters to cover all sessions may turn out to be cost prohibitive if you have a particularly large event. Or you may even have a hard time finding interpreters in your area to cover all events. Where possible, all efforts should be made to ensure interpreters are available, if you know that you will have attendees that need interpreters.

Instead of interpreter, you could organise for CART (Communication Access Realtime Transcription). Basically someone is typing what the presenter says and the transcription is projected on a screen near the main display screen. This has the added advantage that you end up with a transcript of the presentation that you can use to create subtitles for your videos (more on that later), or simply to provide for the attendees after the presentation.

Or you could rely on some imaginative use of technology. This can be tricky, so make sure you thoroughly test whatever solution you come up with ahead of time and in context. For example, I once setup Dragon NaturallySpeaking at a church a Deaf colleague was attending. The church could not afford interpreters, yet they had a few Deaf and hard of hearing parishioners that would have liked to attend services but couldn’t. So a used laptop was donated, a cheap overhead projector was acquired and Dragon was trained for the priest. His sermon were projected on a screen and people who couldn’t hear him speak could read the text. They discovered shortly after they implemented that system that many of the elderly parishioners also benefited from this reasonable accommodation. And the priest realized he now had access to all his sermons in electronic formats, indexed, searchable, etc. As with CART, you’d end up with an exact transcript. BEWARE! This solution worked well in the context of one person speaking in one environment. It may not be optimal when speakers haven’t had time to train the speech-to-text solution.

Accessibility often requires lateral thinking.

SLIDE COLOR SCHEME AND FONT SIZES

Remind speakers that their slides should rely on colors that would be easy to distinguish for the roughly 8% of people who are color blind.

Also, less text per slide, with bigger font is generally better and easier to read. For everyone!

How have you made your conference more accessible for all people?

If you are interested in learning more about Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) or how to make accessibility a natural part of your business through the application of Corporate Social Responsibility, please contact Sandra Broekhof @ 416-579-1035 orsandra_broekhof@sympatico.ca