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Accessibility Checklist for Zoom Meetings and Webinars
How To Make Your Virtual Meetings Accessible for Attendees with Disabilities
During the quarantines of 2020, we moved everything we could online. Meetings, conferences, even multi-day retreats have all been facilitated through Zoom.
Many of these meetings were accessible when they were in person. 1 in 5 working adults has a disability, after all, and 1 in 7 have a hearing impairment.
Virtual meetings and webinars aren’t always inclusive to people with disabilities, however.
“What we have are a few people who know a lot about Accessibility. What we need are a lot of people to know a little about it.” — Matt May, Adobe
According to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, all signatory nations are required to “promote, protect, and ensure the full enjoyment of human rights by persons with disabilities, and ensure that they enjoy full equality under the law.”
The Americans with Disabilities Act, for example, requires that public venues are suitably equipped to allow people with disabilities to participate in live events. Facilities go to great lengths to accomodate physical and sensory impairments. There are volumes of guidelines on how to make a venue accessible, and many buildings and businesses work hard to meet these standards.
That same level of attention is not currently being paid to our virtual venues. Now that all our meetings are online, even though we aren’t meeting in person, we still need to accomodate people with disabilities.
The Internet and Accessibility
There are plenty of resources for designing your websites accessibly — WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, provides a series of specific, testable rules that determine the accessibility of your website, with grades A, AA, or AAA.
But virtual meetings don’t have such a handy accessibility checklist, partially because Zoom is already so disability-friendly.
