There are simple ways to make your online musings more accessible to everyone, particularly those using screen-reading software. We’ve been developing a series of short, informative videos for the Forest Service to help employees embrace some easy suggestions.

For example, using shapes as well as colors in a legend helps those that are color blind understand a map. Fun Fact: Bees can’t see the color red.

Color coding a legend is not enough for everyone

Since we are all very busy at work, it’s easy to put off reading up on how to create accessible documents. The common refrain of ‘nobody with accessibility challenges needs to access this’ assumes you know where your digital documents are going. Nobody can really be sure of that in our digital age, and besides designing for accessibility helps EVERYONE anyway.

Bee careful in your audience assumptions!

Here is a short video overview to the smart use of text and typefaces in digital documents. To build audience interest and observation, we hid an ‘easter egg’ in the video where something visually changes as if by magic. The viewers of the video who correctly identified the change were registered for a drawing to be literally drawn into the final video. See if you can spot the change.

This video follows our introduction to accessibility completed earlier this summer.