Digital Security and Accessibility

Adopting accessibility best practices in your materials and your events can ensure you reach your entire audience and provide an inclusive experience. When distributing information to new recruits and members consider adopting accessibility best practices to ensure your message reaches your whole audience.

General Best Practice:

Add Alt Text to images

Check Color Contrast

Add Captions to video

Provide digital versions of paper flyers, brochures, etc

Paper Flyers

Paper flyers can be a great way to share information, especially at tabling events. However, paper flyers are inaccessible to blind or visually impaired people, so they shouldn’t be the only option. To make sure that all interested students can access the information on the flyer, you could:

Put a QR code on the flyer that leads to an accessible version. Email an accessible version to anyone who provides their email address.

Digital Flyers

PDFs: Making a PDF? Follow our guide for Creating Accessible PDFs

Canva: using Canva to create a flyer? When customizing your template, select File and then Accessibility. From there you can add Alt Text and check color contrast. Select Text Semantics to mark Headings and paragraph text. When you download your completed flyer, make sure to select the filetype PDF Standard (best for documents and emailing).

Email

If you email out a flyer or an image, you can make it accessible by:

  • Ensuring that the flyer is an accessible document,
  • Adding Alt Text to the image, or
  • Including any text from the flyer or image in the body of the email.

Learn more about making emails accessible.

Website

If your student org maintains a website, apply DAS’ Content Creator Essentials for simple ways to improve the accessibility.

Attend a Content Creators Essentials training with DAS.

How to make your social media accessible?

Learn More

*Check color contrast：

Have you ever struggled to read text because it was written in a color that didn’t stand out enough from the background color? This can impact all of us at one time or another, and frequently impacts people with low vision or color blindness. Paper and digital versions of flyers both benefit from checking the contrast ratio. A ratio of 1:1 means that the text and background are the same color (like white on white), and a ratio of 21:1 means the colors are very different - it’s the highest contrast ratio – black on white. A ratio of 4.5:1 is the minimum contrast needed for standard text.

How to fix: Use free tools like Colour Contrast Analyzer to see if your colors have enough contrast.

Digital Security

How to protect your privacy online

Learn More

Accessibility

How to make your event for everyone

Learn More