Across the marketing industry we know how to talk a good game. It’s what we do, right? It’s in our nature to embrace new thinking and search for new ideas. Our DNA is one of being inquisitive about things, wanting to find answers and create solutions.
We look to shed light on important issues, challenges and injustices. Bring a voice to those that don’t have one or aren’t being heard. We actively seek out and listen to different perspectives.
As an industry, we’d likely over-index on the compassion scale.
When it comes to DEI you would struggle to find an agency website or new job post without some words along the lines of “diversity, equity and inclusion are not just values”; “we believe a diverse workforce is essential for inspiring ideas, dialogue and experiences”; “a diverse and inclusive culture is where everyone belongs”.
These are all important words and ambitions. No one can argue that diverse, equitable and inclusive cultures are more creative and more likely to retain talent.
Sadly however, when it comes to DEI the truth is, in our work, we sometimes talk the talk, but don’t always walk the walk.
The reality is today and every day, our industry produces content that simply isn’t accessible enough to people of all abilities, which is the very opposite of inclusive – it’s exclusive (in the worse sense of that word).
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 50 million people in the Middle East, roughly 15% of the global population (that’s 1 in 8 of us), have some form of disability, whether that’s evident to the outside world or a hidden, like dyslexia, ADHD or colour blindness.
While we’d all agree accessibility is a human right, many people with disabilities, physical or mental, simply can’t access content, information or communications channels. Sometimes they can’t access it as easily or readily as their able-bodied counterparts; sometimes they can’t access the platform or engage with the content at all.
Developing more accessible content isn’t just about the desire to do good either. It makes economic sense. By not making our content accessible to all, we’re effectively ignoring a global community of well over a billion people with a collective purchasing power of $13 trillion. Imagine if we told our clients that the campaign we’ve been working on for months, intentionally excludes 15% of the client’s potential purchasers.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
We need to come together to make it table stakes that content should be designed to be accessible to all from the outset, that recognises that we don’t all have the same abilities and caters to the diverse needs of people living with visual, hearing, cognitive and speech impairments in the Middle East.
The good news is the changes we need to make are easy. The technology we need is readily available, and much of it is free. It just needs commitment and an understanding that making regular small efforts will eventually become habit-forming. Here are five simple things you can do today to start making ta positive change:
- Use alternative text (Alt Text) for photography and images to make them accessible to individuals who are blind and partially sighted and reliant on using screen readers.
- Make sure all videos you produce have closed captions to enable the inclusion of people who are deaf, hard of hearing, and/or neurodiverse – it’s useful to do this anyway as we increasingly watch and engage with video content in busy, noisy environments.
- Use meaningful display names for hyperlinks, which help people who use screen readers, keyboard navigation and voice recognition software. Screen readers read all the hyperlinks out in a list at the end of a document rather than one by one – it’s incredibly hard to know what’s being referred to if all are simply listed as “Click here”.
- Do not use acronyms on social posts unless you have previously clarified the unabbreviated name followed by the acronym in parentheses within your post.
- Start a virtual event or meeting with people you don’t already know by giving a self-description – this includes people with visual impairment to get a sense of who you are, the setting you’re in and helps to make them feel included.
While enhanced efforts, prioritisation and a focus on DEI has brought significant progress across our industry, let’s not forget that true inclusion means thinking of everyone.
Making the world accessible and inclusive for people of all abilities impacts us all. For those in the marketing industry, every single one of us has it in our power to contribute through our work.
And let’s not forget, many things in life that started with improving accessibility for the disabled community are things that benefit everyone now. Don’t believe me? Think of everything from the electric toothbrush and bendy straws to audiobooks and Good Grip peelers.
We need less talk and more action. So, let’s put an A for accessibility into DEI… now there’s an IDEA to consider.
By Peter Jacob, Managing Director, Current Global MENAT
