Create Accessible Content

Creating accessible content means ensuring that the words, images, media, documents, and data presented to users can be perceived, understood, and interacted with by people with disabilities. This includes both the raw content (e.g., text, visuals, captions) and the formats in which that content is delivered.

Role in the ENABLE Model

This is the second builder-side intervention in the ENABLE model. It focuses on ensuring the core material being shared or rendered is inclusive before it's placed inside any user interface or application. Without accessible content, even the most technically accessible interface can fail its users.

Why It Matters

Content is the substance of any communication -- whether it's a website, a form, an educational resource, or a government alert. If the content itself is unreadable, non-navigable, or lacks alternative formats, people with disabilities are left behind, no matter how well the surrounding platform is built.

Examples

In the news

Apple previews Live Speech, Personal Voice, and more new accessibility features (May 16, 2023)
-- Apple Newsroom

• Apple announced Personal Voice, a feature that lets users at risk of losing their speech (such as those with ALS) create a synthesized version of their own voice by reading 150 text prompts. This accessible content innovation allows people to preserve their voice identity for use in calls and conversations, demonstrating how builder-side care can address needs before navigator-side compensations become necessary.

National Association of the Deaf v. Netflix Settlement (2012-2016)
-- Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund

• Netflix agreed to caption 100% of its streaming content within two years after the NAD sued over inaccessible video content. This landmark settlement established that accessible content -- including captions -- is a civil rights obligation for streaming services, not an optional feature. Today, Netflix has over 560 titles with audio description and is considered "the dominant provider of streaming content with description" by the American Council of the Blind.

YouTube Experiments with Viewer-Suggested Corrections to Auto-Generated Captions (March 18, 2024)
-- Logie.ai

• YouTube launched a feature allowing viewers to suggest corrections to auto-generated captions. While auto-captions remain problematic -- accuracy can drop to 57.5% in poor audio conditions, leading deaf activist Rikki Poynter to launch the #nomoreCRAPtions movement -- this iteration represents YouTube's acknowledgment that accessible content requires ongoing improvement, not one-time fixes.

• Using plain language for cognitive accessibility
• Providing alt text for images and charts
• Offering transcripts and captions for audio and video
• Supplying accessible data visualizations or alternative summaries
• Structuring documents semantically for screen reader navigation
• Ensuring math content is compatible with MathML or spoken math engines

Care Sounds Like

“We must include a representative sample of people who stutter in our AI training dataset.”
“Our slide deck must include alt text for all images.”
“Let's produce a transcript and a plain language summary alongside this podcast.”
“This table looks great, but does it make sense when read aloud line by line?”

Neglect Sounds Like

“The visuals are self-explanatory, no need to describe them.”
“We don't have time to caption this.”
“Just PDF the scan and upload it.”
“We already wrote it once, why would we rewrite it in plain language?”

Real-World Scenario

A federal agency releases a critical COVID-19 vaccination guide as a PDF, but it's an image-only scan without text recognition or tagging. Screen reader users cannot access it. As a result, blind individuals cannot easily learn how, when, or where to get vaccinated. This wasn't a technical bug -- it was inaccessible content.