In episode 121 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Alan Pringle and Bill Swallow talk about content consumers as content ops stakeholders.
“If you look up a restaurant on your phone and go to view the menu, most of the time, that menu is going to be a PDF. And you are sitting there, zooming in, scrolling around, and pinching, and trying to read this menu that really should have just been a responsive HTML page.”
– Bill Swallow
In episode 119 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Elizabeth Patterson and Bob Johnson of Tahzoo discuss accessibility when authoring DITA content.
“By its very nature, DITA being strongly structured facilitates more accessible content.”
– Bob Johnson
In episode 106 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Bob Johnson of Intuitive talk about accessibility and the Darwin Information Typing Architecture
“If you’re doing it right, accessibility doesn’t look any different than what you’re doing day to day. You’re just adding accessibility considerations when you author your content.”
– Bob Johnson
In this podcast, Sarah discusses content accessibility with Char James-Tanny. What makes content accessible? How can content creators include accessibility in their planning process? What happens if you do not provide accessible content?
00:00 This is the Content Strategy Experts podcast produced by Scriptorium. Since 1997 Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way.
00:14 Sarah O’Keefe: Welcome to the Content Strategy Experts podcast, episode 6. Today I’m delighted to welcome a special guest. Char James-Tanny is a content strategist with over 35 years of experience as a technical communicator. She is currently a principal technical writer for Schneider Electric and based out of Boston. She’s also an advocate for accessibility and that’s our topic for today. Char, welcome.
Whether you’re using relative font sizes for those with low vision, or keyboard functionality for those with motor issues, creating more accessible tech comm content for people with disabilities also makes it easier to navigate and follow for people without disabilities.
Accessibility is a term commonly associated with the process of making content available for people with vision, hearing, and mobility impairments.
In this month’s issue of Inc. Magazine (which I read religiously), you’ll find a feature article on Anna Bradley, who runs a business called Criterion 508 Solutions. (Unfortunately, the full article isn’t available online until later this month, but you can see the abstract here.)
My interest in the article is personal — one of the Criterion contractors featured in the article is Brian Walker, who I know from his presentations on accessibility at WritersUA. Congratulations, Brian!
Web site accessibility has been in the news recently because of the Target.com lawsuit. (Target’s web site has major accessibility problems.) Ms. Bradley points out that making web sites accessible is inexpensive — certainly cheaper than litigation and horrid publicity (i.e. “Target doesn’t care about blind people”) — and furthermore, an accessible web site allows an organization to increase the number of customers that use the site. In other words, from a business standpoint, it’s pretty easy to justify spending money to ensure that more people will be able to buy things from you.
