Grow Your Professional Connections with Simple Digital Accessibility Habits

Every day at Wake Forest, staff and faculty dedicate their expertise to creating and curating digital materials. That digital communication enables vital outreach to students, colleagues, alumni, and the broader community. We rely on documents, emails, images, media, and websites to outline next steps, build partnerships, and gain traction for important endeavors across campus.

While we leverage the methods we think will best reach our intended audience, anticipating every barrier to engagement isn’t always easy. Though no one can anticipate every hiccup or benefit in our evolving digital landscape, we know that good accessibility practices create a better user experience across the wide variety of devices and workflows people use every day.

Building accessibility into one of our most prevalent communication tools—email—is a simple place to start. Making these five habits part of your routine helps you connect more effectively with people with disabilities and reach your entire audience. Once established, you can easily expand these practices to all your digital communications!

1. Supporting the visual: Pair essential text with a flyer.

Printable posters and flyers are visually appealing, but text locked inside an image isn’t readable by assistive technologies or screen readers.

• Don’t rely on the flyer alone: Put critical details (dates, times, locations, and descriptions) in machine-readable plain text within the email body.
• Improve searchability: Machine-readable “real” text ensures that recipients who can’t see the flyer still receive the message while allowing anyone to quickly search their inbox for key event information later.

Explore more tips on how to make flyers and posters accessible.

2. Embedded images & screenshots: Pair visuals with alt text.

If you plan to use screenshots or embedded images to share information, add alternative text (alt text) so that everyone receives your message.

• Keep it balanced: If a screenshot requires a long explanation, add a brief alt text to the image itself and place the detailed description in the body of the email. This extra context benefits all readers.
• Focus on function: Alt text should convey the core information someone would miss if the image doesn’t load or can’t be seen.
• How to add alt text in Gmail:
  1. Click the image inside the body of your draft email.
  2. Select Edit alt text from the options at the bottom of the image.
  3. Enter the purpose or meaning of the image in the Description field.
  4. Click Apply.

Listen to or read more about effective alt text practices

3. Front-load information: Put key details first.

Structure your communication so that the most important takeaways appear early in both your subject line and the opening lines of your email.

• Support focused reading: Getting straight to the main point benefits all readers, particularly those who are neurodivergent or who rely on screen readers or other assistive technologies to navigate their inbox.

4. Descriptive hyperlinks: Give your links meaning.

Raw, full-length URLs look cluttered, while generic phrases like “click here” or “read more” fail to explain where a link leads when read out of context by assistive tools.

• Use meaningful labels: Rename links across emails, social posts, documents, and slides so the link text clearly describes the destination. Most platforms allow you to do this easily.
• Example: A link labeled Social Media Accessibility Toolkit is far more informative than a raw URL like docs.google.com/document/d/1VU3vdS_mJQrH-algn1-wpibHBOLoHwwmpYNRPaf7Nao/edit?usp=sharing.

5. Acronyms & abbreviations: Define terms on first use.

FDOC, OAA, OOE, CAT, OIE, ECI, CLASS, RLH, HR, IS, LDOC… Higher education heavily relies on abbreviations, but not everyone from every department, background, or experience level automatically knows what they mean.

• Provide context: Spell out abbreviations the first time you use them in a given context to ensure no one feels excluded.
• When in doubt, share more: Erring on the side of providing extra clarity prevents misunderstandings and builds a more welcoming communication culture.

It’s about progress, not perfection.

While fully accessible archives are the ideal, the most sustainable path forward is focusing on the next thing you create. In time, you can review your backlog of inherited and created content to improve the accessibility of even more of your communication materials.

To start, add alt text to your next email, spell out an acronym in today’s note, and ensure your next social media graphic isn’t the sole source of text. Focusing on small, incremental improvements builds momentum and creates lasting and impactful accessibility habits.

Remember, these practices are big wins for accessibility and good user experiences, but no one expects perfection. Accessibility is about steady progress that adds up. So keep practicing, keep learning, and stay connected:

Continue building accessibility at Wake:

• Connect with us: Reach out for questions or further conversation by contacting Eudora Struble at .
• Explore upcoming sessions: Check out scheduled digital accessibility training sessions.
• Request team training: Request a curated training session tailored for your department.

Continue Your Professional Development with HRLD:

• Visit HRLD online.
• Explore more posts on the Career Coaching Corner.