Does your newsroom meet accessibility requirements?
Your newsroom's template and press releases
As part of a continued effort to make the web accessible for everyone, it's good to consider your own newsroom as well.
One major thing to remember is that your newsroom will inherit most of its visual presentation from the website it's based on. This means that, especially with respect to color contrast and font size, it's recommended to have a look at your website as a whole.
Despite this, there are a few things you can do to make your newsroom more accessible:
- Provide captions for all videos that contain sound. Both YouTube and Vimeo support captions and can be embedded in your newsroom. It's also possible to upload VTT captioning files after adding a video to the Asset Manager.
- Don't use autoplay on audio. Many users will not appreciate audio being played automatically and some of them have trouble with focus and will be distracted.
- Provide text-only alternatives for non-text content. With the popularity of infographics, providing alt text is essential here. If the infographic contains a lot of information, a better alternative may be to simply write out what the infographic says below it.
- Use meaningful anchor text linking to other pages. This helps people with screen readers.
- Keep load times ('performance') of your newsroom in mind. There are many, many reasons for this and one of them is to keep your newsroom accessible to users in regions with slower connections.
- Write your press releases in a clear way that can be understood by everyone.
Explain acronyms on first use. Provide a glossary for jargon and other terms people may not be familiar with. Use lists where appropriate: numbered lists for lists that require a certain order, bullet points for unordered lists.
If your newsroom's template causes accessibility issues, please inform us; we will have a look and make any possible adjustments.
Generally speaking, accessible content is more usable for everyone and benefits all.
An excellent resource to learn more on making the web more accessible to everyone is the Web Accessibility Initiative.
The Presspage platform
The other end of the bargain is that we're focused on keeping the Presspage platform itself accessible as well. Screen readers require that a site should be navigated by a keyboard and all non-text items contain a text alternative (so a screen reader can read them). Presspage's platform fulfills both these requirements. The platform adheres to WCAG 2.1 AA standards.
There are a few exceptions. For example, the images in the Facebook widget can’t be read because it is a third party tool, which we cannot control.
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