Considering how people take in information differently can make our products better for everyone. That’s especially true in government when the information we share needs to be accessible to all the people we serve.
In this issue we highlight two examples of how we’re trying to make our work better for people who are blind or have low vision.
What security codes sound like
When you reset a password or have an extra layer of security on an account, you'll typically get a recovery code. This is a crucial piece of information that's required to get into your account.
For people who are blind or have low vision, they may rely on a screen reader to get this information. Which raises the question: What do randomized codes sound like?
We explored this question while we worked on creating accessible recovery codes for our COVID Alert healthcare portal.
Governments share important information about services online. Social media has become a common tool to do this. But practices for creating social media messages, like using hashtags or putting information in images, don’t always translate well when the messages are being read by screen readers.
In this blog post, we talk about what we’ve learned about making social media more accessible for everyone who needs the information we share on it.
To communicate emojis, screen readers read out the emoji’s description or name. With this in mind, here are a couple of tips to help make sure emojis aren’t barriers to people understanding your message:
Listening to multiple emojis is time consuming. Try to limit your emoji use to one per message.
Emojis break up the flow of the text. Try to keep emojis at the end of the message.
The descriptions of emojis aren’t always bilingual. Try to use words instead of emojis to describe things that add important context.
The description of an emoji may not be what you think it is. For example: the fist emoji reads as “oncoming fist”, not a fist bump. Try to do some research beforehand to understand the description of commonly used emojis.
