A Guide to Creating Inclusive & Accessible Events (Checklist)

Event experiences should be for all: from the event website and landing page to the registration process, all the way to the event itself, and post-event communication and surveys. But the reality is that most events and meetings are not, unfortunately, delivering an accessible event experience at all touchpoints for their attendees. 

Here are some considerations you should be providing to create accessible event experiences for your audience.

People with disabilities access and navigate the Web differently, depending on their individual needs and preferences. Many times, assistive technology is used to ensure users can access, understand, and navigate websites. 

In a broad sense, assistive technology (AT) is any device, piece of equipment, or system that helps a person with a disability increase, maintain, or improve their functional capabilities. 

Examples of assistive technology include:

With that in mind, it’s important to consider that your event website and registration journey is accessible to these tools so that users with minor or major impairments can still navigate and understand your website and, ultimately, register and attend your event. 

A clear and straightforward layout for easy navigation and exploration of the entire event website can make for a truly accessible event experience for your attendees.

Simplified summaries for passages of text can also make it easier to understand the content of your website. The document outline feature can provide a representation of the content that only shows the headings and relevant structures (such as headings, nesting, and hierarchy) to help provide orientation and an overview of the contents. This can also help to avoid overloading the user with information.

Provide an option that only shows the most relevant information or more frequently used functions; for example, by hiding other parts of the content that can distract users or make it harder to navigate the website.

Make sure you use strong color contrast between text and images of your digital assets so that attendees with visual impairments or cognitive disabilities can read the text and navigate through the online event with utmost ease.

Ensure that you use font types, sizes, colors, and spacing ideal to make text easier to read. Provide guests with the option to change the size of the font to zoom in and out to support their vision and read through the event without any difficulty.

Page Narration / Text-to-speech 

Speech output can automatically convert text into a synthesized voice reading the text aloud. By providing on-screen text narration, guests with visual impairments can access all the content on your event website.

Also referred to as “video descriptions” and “described video,” these narrations describe important visual details in a video. 

Text with a verbatim recording of any speech and with descriptions of relevant auditory information that appears simultaneously with the audio (including audio that accompanies video in multimedia). For real-time captioning, typically, professional CART writers are necessary.

Text manuscripts containing the correct sequence of verbatim recordings of any speech and descriptions of important auditory or visual information.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 is a set of recommendations by the W3 working group that follows best practices for ADA (American Disability Act) website accessibility compliance. 

The WCAG 2.1 AA covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content more accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including accommodations for blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity, and combinations of these, and some accommodations for learning disabilities and cognitive limitations; but will not address every user need for people with these disabilities. 

These guidelines address the accessibility of web content on desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices. Following these guidelines will also make Web content more usable to users in general.

We are pleased to announce that, in an effort to support Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs (DEI), the Attendease platform, as of May 27, 2022, is compliant with W3 WCAG 2.1 AA.

The Attendease platform allows customers to use the features and functionality to manage and execute their portfolio of events and attendee-facing websites. While the Attendease dashboard is NOT accessible compliant, the W3 WCAG 2.1 AA is true for the attendee-facing event websites using Attendease’s pre-built website templates. This means event planners can use our event platform and pre-built templates to deliver accessible event experiences to users. 

Here’s a checklist to help you ensure accessibility and inclusion for all event attendees.

Contact us to learn how Attendease can help you start, improve, and perfect your journey to deliver an accessible event experience for all of your attendees.