Happy Global Accessibility Awareness Day

There are over a billion disabled people world-wide who often face barriers using the web. Global Accessibility Awareness Day exists to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access and inclusion. 

Removing barriers for everyone

In the UK alone there are 

• 16.8 million disabled people, including people with MS
• 1.3 million people with a learning difficulty
• 7 million people with dyslexia.

Every single one of our visitors deserves a first-rate online experience. But many disabled people face barriers to interacting with or understanding content. Examples of barriers include

• videos that don't have subtitles for people with hearing problems, or audio description for people with low vision
• long or complicated sentences that are hard to follow for anyone with cog fog or fatigue
• buttons and interfaces that don't have way for someone with tremor to click through without using a mouse

When we remove these barriers, we usually find we're improving everyone's experience. Like being able to use subtitles to watch a video when you forget your headphones!

What do we do to make sure we're accessible?

There's a lot going on behind the scenes to make our tools and services work for everyone with MS, their friends and families. As a baseline, we make sure the code used to build our digital platforms works with the technology disabled people use to browse the web. Read more in our accessibility statement

But there's lots of things we do when we're writing, or crafting social media posts that make a big difference. And we wanted to share some of them with you.

We use Plain English

Plain English is a way of writing that puts the person who's going to read your words first. It's action based, clear and concise. And research shows most technical experts prefer it.

It's one of the 5 pillars of our MS Society tone of voice. It means we use short sentences, avoid jargon. And always think of you, our reader, before we start.

We make our social posts accessible

There's a lot of little things we can all do to make our social media posts accessible. Our Social Media team have shared these tips to help you be more accessible.

Describing images with alt text

Facebook, Instagram and Twitter all have the option to add descriptions to images and gifs. These are vital for people using screen reading software to understand what's going on in your post. They're particularly important if most of the meaning is in the image, or there's writing on it.

Using emojis sparingly

Emojis make things exciting and add a bit of variety to a post. Just like exclamation marks, they should be used sparingly.

If you try using the accessibility features on your phone you'll quickly discover that the text reader will read out each and every emoji name. Hearing the word “party popper” repeated over and over and over again gets old very quickly.

Making hashtags accessible

Long hash tags like #globalaccessibilityawarenessday can be hard to understand. We use CamelCase to make them easier to read. Both by humans and screen reading technology.

As the name suggests, CamelCase is about getting the bumps in the right places, by using capital letters at the start of each word within the hashtag.

So #globalaccessibilityawarenessday becomes #GlobalAccessibilityAwarenessDay (link opens in Twitter).

Constantly improving our accessibility

We're always working to improve our accessibility for everyone who visits our website and channels.

Read our accessibility statement to find out more

But for now we hope these simple tips that everyone can follow will help you improve your own accessibility!

We originally wrote this blog on 20 May 2021 and update it every May.