Promoting Make Presentations Accessible

From Education & Outreach

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We welcome your help telling presenters, trainers, conference organizers and others about How to Make Presentations Accessible.
You are welcome to use the sample wording below for your own blog posts, newsletter articles, etc.
If you write a blog, newsletter article, or such, please let us know by sending e-mail to wai-eo-editors@w3.org and we'll add it to our list.

Resources & Pointers

Audience & Messages

  1. Conference organizers - make your whole conference accessible, require that your speakers make their presentations accessible
  2. Presenters - reach all of your audience!

Blog & newsletter ideas you can use

See W3C blog 20 Feb 2012

...

Presentations that are accessible to people with disabilities are inclusive to many more audiences as well, including people who are not fluent in the language and people with different learning styles. Accessible presentations also have additional benefits, such as in these situations:

  • Consider a live presentation with visuals that is recorded and made available online as an audio podcast. If during the presentation you described the visuals (for people who are blind or otherwise cannot see them well), then those listening to the podcast will also get the visual information.
  • CART provides real-time text of the speaker and other audio. CART is used by people who are deaf or hard of hearing, people who can understand text better than spoken language — including people whose native language is different, and others. CART output can also be used to develop a transcript.
  • Transcripts can be put online to increase search engine optimization (SEO) and realize the other benefits of transcripts .

Tweet ideas you can use

(Note: short URI to blog post: http://bit.ly/YourPreso)

E-mail ideas you can use

See Feb 2012 WAI IG e-mail
(Note: short URI to blog post: http://bit.ly/YourPreso)

To conference organizers:

main points:

  • please add a link to this document on your website wherever your provide information for speakers
  • please send this link to your speakers and encourage them to make their presentations accessible
  • consider including accessibility as a requirement in speaker contracts

example 1 (drafted by Shawn)

Subject: [Acme] Conference Quality Improvements

Hi [organizer],

You can improve the quality of [your conference | conference name] through accessibility. *Inclusive conferences and presentations are accessible to people with disabilities and work better for all your attendees, including those without disabilities*. There are many additional benefits of inclusive presentations, especially if you are in a large venue, have remote participants, provide podcasts of presentations, or make material available after the conference.

W3C WAI has a resource to help conference organizers and presenters improve your events:
     How to Make Presentations Accessible to All
     http://www.w3.org/WAI/training/accessible.php

*Because this is so important, I am writing to ask if you would send this link to your speakers and encourage them to make their presentations accessible*. (and let me know if you do, as we are tracking outreach on it :)

(As always, we welcome suggestions on how we might improve this resource in future versions. You can comment on the blog post at http://www.w3.org/QA/2012/02/make_presentations_accessible.html or send e-mail to the publicly archived list wai-eo-editors@w3.org or WAI staff-only list wai@w3.org )

Thanks for your help making conferences and presentations more accessible!

~Shawn

To presenters:

...

EOWG planning & record keeping

blogs, newsletters, references, etc.

  • commented on post about Planning a Tech Event {shawn 20 January 2016}

Mailing lists

  • WebAIM - 20 Feb, Jennifer
  • VICUG-L - 20 Feb, Jennifer

Tweets

Presenters for Specific Conferences

e.g., the conference organizers said they were sending (or had sent) the info to their presenters

LinkedIn groups

2012 EOWG Recent Contacts

Done:

  • ADA Webinar on Designing Accessible Webinars - sent e-mail to instructor on 21 Jan 2014, Shawn
  • eAccess 12 - sent to organizer, 16 April , Jennifer
  • W4A 2012 - sent email to General Co-Chairs Julio Abascal & Markel Vigo, 26 March, Shawn (and Shadi before that :/
  • WWW 20120 - sent e-mail to conference contact, 20 Feb, Shawn
  • ICCHP - ?, Shadi
  • distributed to 17 people via private email campaign, Feb. 20, Jennifer
  • SXSW interactive to Hugh via personal e-mail (reply: This is great -- we *will* try to get this out to speakers... in future years, it would help a ton to get something like in October or November (which is when we first start communicating with speakers) shawn: That URI is stable and you can add it to your template for communications for later this year. ;) update: "we incorporated into the last-minute e-mail that ISA (interactive speaker assistants) are sending to speakers.") - 22 February 2012 - Shawn
  • An Event Apart to Jeffrey Zeldman via personal e-mail, to Marci Eversole via contact form (reply: Thanks Shawn, I will pass this information on for you. Marci) - 20 February 2012 - Shawn
  • Digital Accessibility Expo organizers to DIGITALACEXPO@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU and Kevin Price direct e-mail - 20 February 2012 - Shawn
  • UN Enable Newsletter - 27 February 2012 - Vicki
  • Promoting the use in own organisation (National Board of Social Services) planning to expand to rest of organization: Ministry of Social Affairs and Integration and translate into Danish - 16 March - Helle
  • presented at Canberra Barcamp 2012 - 17 March - Andrew
  • Noticed this recent project, Making Events Accessible launched by Social Care Institute for Excellence. On March 25, sent Feedback to request that "Making Presentations..." be included (Jennifer).

Note that some of this information was taken from a G3ICT post and initially posted to this Wiki page on August 21, 2012 by Jennifer. Then, Jennifer sent individual emails to organizers of these conferences on August 22, 2012:

Jennifer also sent the same message to the public WAI-Engage email list on august 22, 2012.

To Do:

Conferences

Conference that specifically want to target (mostly those that overlap with the primary audience of WAI work):

(Andrew wonders why just conferences that have a primary target of WAI work? - ah, because of EO's charter? {shawn replies: yup.})

Vicki says: even so, :) many others to reach, so I would like to propose contacting: UN Organizations, I can reach the conference persons in a number of the organizations (e.g. UNOG, UN NY, ITU, ILO, WHO, UNCTAD, UNHCR, UNDESA etc.) {shawn happy for you to contact all these!!!}

Presenters & bloggers that presenters read
  • Chris Brogan (Consider whether Jennifer should ask Glenda W-H to promote How to Make Presentations Accessible on his site).
  • Chris Heilmann's site -- since he attends a lot of conferences, he might be willing to promote
Misc