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Accessible Authoring tools brief 2: Healthcare (DRAFT)

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RealJoshue108 edited this page Sep 20, 2021 · 4 revisions

Authoring tools for Healthcare Accessibility

This page gets you started in understanding some key points, as well as explanation of terminology and links to practical resources for accessible healthcare.

[@@ Related Video on authoring tools?] Authoring Tools Accessibility Overview

Introduction: Accessible tools in healthcare:

When people think of healthcare accessibility - one of the first things that comes to mind is access to the building. If it is a walk-in clinic, or pharmacy, or whether you can get seen by a consultant to get the healthcare you need in the first place! What is not often considered is the first points of contact for the public, such as your services' website, it’s content and any alternatives or any app a patient may use to access healthcare services and related information.

Having accessible information for current and potential users of your healthcare service is critical and 'make or break' if a patient gets the healthcare they need in a timely manner. Not doing so, has legal consequences in the US where a lack of accessible information violates Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) prohibits discrimination based on disability and integrates with other anti-discrimination and civil rights legislation.

The COVID pandemic has also highlighted the need for a more digitally inclusive healthcare system. This can be achieved by being aware of the benefits of accessibility, and accessible tools.

The good news is with some care and attention, you and others in your healthcare team can create accessible information that is inclusive to healthcare providers and staff with disabilities, as well as the public.

How using accessible authoring tools helps

Using the right tool can reduce 'extra' work needed to reach your accessibility goals, remove the need to retrofit content for accessibility, and unnecessarily duplicate your workload. Doing it right first time round goes a long way to meets diverse user needs.

Understanding the process for 'accessible authoring' and production is also important, there may be 'many steps' in the process. For example, consider a simple webpage or downloadable document that you wish to deliver to your patients. You may need to undertake the following:

  • Simple color contrast checking, can make all the different between being able to perceive and understand critical content for a patient or staff member with a vision impairment.

  • If you have PDFs, or Word documents, you need to make them accessible at source too. This can make your resources accessible to users of assistive technology, such as screen reader users and others. Doing this correctly can 'make or break' a patient’s access to critical health related information. No tool will automatically make this happen, but with some simple steps you can use existing features of Word or Acrobat to make your documents highly accessible with not much effort on your part.

  • If you are giving access to personal healthcare information via a website, ensure the content management system (CMS) or whatever tool you use, can support you in the process of uploading content that supports accessibility.

  • Ensure any WYSIWYG edit will support your accessibility needs.

There are many things to consider - and a good, accessible authoring tool, should help with this process. Combined with some sound basic knowledge of accessibility, you will be well on your way to creating more accessible experiences for your students.

Getting the right accessible tools

Fixing accessibility issues when writing or creating content can greatly reduce problems for your staff and patients, as well as you. Talk to your suppliers about accessibility! It is critical to only purchase tools for your organization that will support the accessibility needs of staff and patients. If your software vendor says that they don’t have support for accessibility user needs, then don’t buy that tool. Indeed, tell them why you didn’t, and they will then take accessibility requirements more seriously. Ultimately, having a dialogue with the suppliers of your tools and software and feeding back that you consider accessibility to be critical as a requirement when procuring, makes them take it seriously too.

Practical things you can do

  • You can review the ‘[https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/atag/glance/ ATAG at a Glance]’ document and offer it to your suppliers. This is a good way for everyone to have a grasp of what they should be looking for.

  • Support healthcare workers with disabilities with accessible information and tools.

  • Ensure the tools you use whether form generators, site builders, "Save as HTML" have accessibility checkers and features.

  • Support patients with disabilities and make sure digital paperwork, health record information is accessible to people with disabilities.

  • Sensor enabled wearables need to output user data in an accessible way.

  • Only use accessible PDF files and provide access to braille and other alternatives.

  • Use accessibility features in your existing software such as Office365, Adobe Acrobat etc. These have excellent accessibility related tools and checkers that will help you easily create much more accessible documents and content.

  • When using apps to provide remote healthcare advice or telemedicine consultations ensure the needs of people with disabilities are met such as by using captioning, or transcription services.

More Information and Guidance

Terminology

https://github.com/w3c/wai-intro-atag.wiki.git

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