Blog: 'Think carefully about the disabled people in your audience'
The English Federation of Disability Sport (EFDS) website features a blog post every Friday through the year.
May's theme is communications. This week, Catherine Grinyer, inclusive communications consultant, discusses how the secret to effective communications is realising the solution is not one-size-fits-all.
Catherine‘s blog:
Nearly 10 years ago I became the Director of Communications and Marketing at the Business Disability Forum. I was excited about my new role and looked forward to the challenge of communicating with my new business audience.
In my first week I was rather taken aback when my team asked me to review a publication to check for its ‘accessibility’. This was a totally new concept to me and I must confess, I wasn’t sure what they meant.
As soon as it was explained to me the lights went on. I realised that in previous roles I had unwittingly been excluding disabled people from my campaigns. It wasn’t intentional, I just didn’t know.
I was horrified, and wanted to get up-to-speed on how to communicate with people with impairments and health conditions. What I found was that there was, and still is, a distinct lack of guidance and training for professional communicators on the delivery of inclusive communications.
"In an era of mass communications it’s the human touch that counts"
Over the years I have taught myself how to do it. I’ve asked disabled people about their communications needs and the barriers they encounter and come up with the solutions, including a healthy dose of trial and error.
The most important component of delivering inclusive communications, apart from wanting to, is getting the right suppliers to work on your campaigns.
Many of the suppliers I have worked with have never thought about the communications barriers that disabled people face, so there’s a steep learning curve each time a new project begins.
If you find a writer, designer and a web developer that understands inclusivity, hold on to them for dear life!
The communications industry works tirelessly to find new and exciting ways to engage audiences. We’re storytellers at heart and we have worked out that in an era of mass communications it’s the human touch that counts. But are we really offering a personalised service?
Every flyer, email and newsletter you receive today will probably address you by name – in many cases by your first name. It’s smoke and mirrors of course, as you are just logged on a database with the other 10,000 subscribers. We’re giving the illusion of personalised communications, but you’re actually getting a standard communication aimed to appeal to the ‘norm’.
"How do we make our communications inclusive to disabled people?"
But when it comes to communicating with disabled people, there is no such thing as ‘one-size-fits-all’.
There are around 12 million disabled people in the UK. The term ‘disability’ covers a very broad definition of impairments and health conditions.
You don’t need to be an expert on disability to know that it’s hard to think of a single product, service, event or communications campaign that would meet the needs of all 12 million disabled people in one go.
As one size doesn’t fit all, how do we make our communications inclusive to disabled people?
A good starting point is to get to know the types of barriers disabled people experience and then look at what you need to do to remove those barriers. Here are some the main disability/impairment groups and the barriers that might be encountered:
- Blind/visual impairment (print publications (magazines, flyers and reports), inaccessible websites, use of images, PowerPoint presentations, PDF documents, colour contrast, posters, displays, banner stands, videos without audio commentary)
- Deaf/hearing loss (face-to-face communications such as speeches, presentations, awards ceremonies, announcements via loudspeakers and coaching sessions, videos without captioning or BSL interpretation, musical accompaniment (events, ceremonies on videos)
- Learning disability (complex use of language, data visualisation, layout of websites and documents, colour contrast, use of images, lengthy communications)
- Mobility impairment (website layout and accessibility (e.g. too many clicks), positioning of signage, posters and flyers, weight of printed publications)
- Mental health condition (layout, use of colour, tone and style of language, frequency)
Before you plan your next campaign I’d urge you to think carefully about the disabled people in your audience. Then you need to think about what you can do to remove barriers and include as many people as possible in your communications.
One size does not fit all, so you might need to do things a bit differently.
