I just got back from Accessibility Camp, which is an Unconference about making content available to people, and apparently the third of its kind for the DC area.

What is Accessibility?

You may have noticed that I stated that the event is about “making content available to people,” and not “disabled people” or even “those who use screen-readers.” Those last two groups are important, no doubt, but accessibility of information is for all people, and that was my main takeaway from the event. People run the whole gamut: those with perfect vision, versus those that need larger text, versus those that are colorblind, versus those that rely on adaptive technologies, such as screen-readers. And those are only a few subgroups based on vision alone.

Did you know that roughly 18% of the U.S. population has some form of hearing loss? Did you know that by including closed captions or a transcript with your videos or podcasts, you could be reaching nearly a fifth more people?

Even if we were to discount physical disability from the conversation, we could spend great amounts of time talking about accessible content across devices and browsers. The user may have different experiences moving through that landscape of different technologies, but the content should remain clear.

Accessibility Now!

My second takeaway from the event: accessibility isn’t always easy, and you have to make sure that you’re asking the right questions when “going through your checklist” (For example, “Do I have alt tags on my images?” is a bad question. “Do I have appropriately used alt tags?” is a better one.), but we need to stop making excuses and just do it. Do what’s easy. Do it moving forward. Take small steps and iterate. Honestly, we can only get better at it, and there is no good excuse to not make the attempt.

John Croston, the man behind the event, has a fantastic list of resources to get started on his blog. So go, take a look at them, and get started today.