When you think of inclusion in the workplace, do you think of digital inclusion? Today is the 11th Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) and an excellent day to get everyone talking, thinking, and learning about digital access and inclusion and the more than one billion people worldwide with disabilities/ impairments.
Think about the One Billion people with disabilities/impairments, including:
- Visual disabilities, such as blindness, reduced vision, or color blindness, who need audio cues when online
- Auditory disabilities, such as deafness, who need video captioning and visual indicators
- Motor disabilities, such as inability to use a mouse, slow response times, or physical disabilities, who need alternative keyboards, eye control, or some other adaptive hardware to help them type and navigate on their devices
- Cognitive disabilities, such as learning disabilities, who need an uncluttered screen, consistent navigation, and the use of plain language
Imagine scrolling online in public
Maybe you are on the train or bus to work or working from a crowded coffee shop, and you start to scroll through your online content. What do you do when you come across a video without captions? Most people would scroll right on by. Videos with captions receive more views and generate 12x more shares than videos without captions. But for the hearing impaired, captions are critical. Over 5% of the world’s population, or 466 million people, has disabling hearing loss (432 million adults and 34 million children). According to the World Health Organization, by 2050, nearly 2.5 billion people are projected to have some degree of hearing loss.
Whether you have auditory disabilities, have different levels of language proficiency, or are joining from a noisy area, video meetings should be accessible for everyone. That’s why RingCentral Video offers closed captioning, which automatically converts spoken words into captions in real-time.
Digital accessibility and inclusion for all
RingCentral provides several features, in addition to closed captioning, to help organizations be more digitally accessible and inclusive, including:
- Accessibility settings to quickly customize font size for easier legibility.
- Screen reader support to enable quick navigation for those with vision limitations.
- Color and high contrast to improve readability for everyone, including those impaired with poor eyesight.
- Voicemail-to-text to turn on visual voice messages for everyone, including the hearing impaired.
- Active speaker highlights to automatically highlight interpreter and speaker videos or create a custom view.
RingCentral brings accessible, mobile communications to CNIB Foundation
One organization that took advantage of RingCentral’s accessibility features was CNIB Foundation (Canadian National Institute for the Blind), Canada’s oldest and largest organization serving people with sight loss. CNIB Foundation found it challenging to have accessible, cloud-based communications capabilities because there are few technology solutions that cater to people with sight loss. CNIB Foundation selected RingCentral for its features such as screen magnification, screen reading, and keyboard-controlled hot keys that are essential to CNIB Foundation’s workforce, as 20 percent are people with sight loss. They selected Web Content Accessibility Guidelines-compliant RingCentral MVP for its ability to seamlessly switch from desktop to mobile, making it easy for those who are blind or partially sighted to work from anywhere. With the organization’s mission to enable people impacted by blindness to “live the lives they choose,” RingCentral was the right technology fit.
It is essential to keep accessibility top of mind all year round. RingCentral supports #GAAD today and every day. We are on a mission to ensure that people of all abilities can effortlessly communicate and collaborate with one another. Learn more about accessibility at RingCentral.
How is your organization providing digital access and inclusion? I would love to hear from you.
