The process of hosting an accessible event actually starts with utilizing proper web accessibility practices and assessing your technology for accessibility. After all, if people with disabilities aren’t able to view conference information or register, they largely won’t be able to learn about or attend the conference.
Most events today utilize online registration and make pre-information available on the organizer’s website and social media pages. In general, this is much more convenient for attendees than in-person registration. However, if your registration forms and the event’s web presence are not following web accessibility guidelines, people with disabilities will be left out.
By making some fairly simple adjustments to your online content, you can make your event registration process accessible to a much wider audience. Here’s what you need to know for each web platform you plan to utilize.
Social media accessibility
If you are advertising your event on social media (which you probably should be doing) or using social media to share pre-event information with attendees, consider whether your content is accessible.
One helpful thing that you can do is to add photo descriptions into your captions on photo-based platforms like Instagram. Add a description of the photo and any wording that appears in the image. This helps people who are blind or visually impaired that may be using screen readers understand what the image is displaying and provides context for your photo caption.
On video-based platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram Reels and Stories, be sure to enable closed captioning on your videos and correct any errors in the auto-generated captions. Don’t edit out stutters or speaking errors, as the captions should accurately reflect what was said, but do edit misspellings or auto-caption wording misinterpretations.
Website accessibility
Make your website accessible to everyone including those with vision or hearing limitations and those using assistive technology to navigate your website.
When it comes to registration pages, one of the most important things is properly labeling form fields. You’ll likely have many fields on your registration form that need to be filled out. If these fields aren’t labeled correctly, screen readers may skip over them.
The forms as well as your website content should also be fully functional with keyboard navigation. All fields or elements on your registration and information pages that can be selected, controlled, or activated with a mouse should be equally functional with keyboard-only navigation.
Some other web accessibility best practices to keep in mind are alt text and color contrast. You want to make sure that text contrasts adequately from the background color so that it is readable to everyone including those with color blindness. Alt text provides a text description of images displayed on your website or registration page so that those using assistive technology such as screen readers can understand what information you are sharing through images.
Mobile websites
It’s also important to be aware that the mobile version of a website is not automatically accessible just because the desktop version of the website is accessible. Try accessing your website in a mobile browser and confirm that the website is still meeting web accessibility guidelines and that mobile accessibility tools like VoiceOver on iOS work well on your web pages.
Other registration considerations
Now you should be ready to start optimizing your social media content, registration pages, and other websites to be accessible to all viewers. In addition to online accessibility best practices, it’s also a good idea to include an accommodation contact on your registration webpage in case someone has questions about event accessibility or needs assistance with registration.
Offering different communication channels is helpful, as everyone’s disability and experience with their disability is different, so a one size fits all approach will never actually work for everyone. An accommodation email contact is great, and adding a phone number is even better. The ability to request information and register over the phone is not a substitute for web accessibility, but it does provide another option that can sometimes benefit people with disabilities.
Also remember that it’s not only the pre-event information that needs to be accessible. You should be working to make your whole website accessible as well as any virtual components of the event itself.
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