Making Young Storytellers Accessible
PC: Werner Romero
Young Storytellers believes in raising voices, particularly those that don’t often get listened to. In order to make that possible, we know it’s crucial to keep centering diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and anti-racism in everything we do.
In our continued efforts to better meet the needs of the people we work with, we’ve begun using new tools to increase equitable access to our digital materials and information. This means making sure that anyone who interacts with Young Storytellers online is able to get information and engage with us, regardless of ability, age, language, or access to technology.
Read on to learn more about our developments and plans for the future!
Revamping our Website
People access the internet in different ways. Not everyone has access to a desktop computer or laptop - in fact, more than 60% of internet users use a mobile device to go online. We are proud to share that our website is now designed to be more mobile friendly, providing a similar experience no matter where or how you log on.
We’ve also added an accessibility widget designed to make reading easier for different kinds of readers. By clicking the circular blue icon at the left of the screen, you can change the way our website looks to best fit your needs.
With this tool, you can open a control panel to apply different settings like text size, eliminating images, adjusting colors, and making fonts Dyslexia friendly. There’s even a dictionary and a screen reader!
Another aspect of a more accessible web design is the creation of alt text for images, which is done by AI and members of the YS staff. Alt text is a description of the appearance or purpose of an image on screen.
This feature is helpful for users unable to see or visually identify them, particularly visually impaired users accessing our website via screen reader. Alt text also can provide an image description if images are blocked by a browser or unable to load.
Improving Communications
Aside from technological improvements, it’s important to us that our information itself is accessible. We’ve consolidated webpages and cleaned up structure to make sure need-to-know info is easy to find and understand, particularly for our volunteers and student alumni.
Even more importantly, our website is now fully available in Spanish. Most of the young people we serve come from families and neighborhoods that predominantly speak Spanish. Translating our website helps guarantee that all families and guardians can understand and partake in what we do. We also send all email communication to our alumni families in both English and Spanish.
Goals for the Future
These are just a few examples of projects that we’re working on:
Continue improving the user experience of our website. For example, further developing a fully fledged webpage for our volunteers to lower load times and make information easier to find.
Continue shaping our offerings to best serve the needs of our students and their families. Adding more languages to our website translation options depending on our student population will mean more people can understand what we do.
Continue making our website easy to find and navigate. For example, improving search engine optimization (SEO). This means internally tagging our web pages better so that our website is easier to search.
Making accessibility a priority goes beyond just improving our technology - it means we keep thinking about everyone in our community, how they experience Young Storytellers, and how we can make the world a better place. As we continue to learn and grow as an organization, we strive to find new ways to make the work we do accessible, from volunteer training to alumni offerings. If you have ideas or suggestions for how we can improve, please reach out. Stay tuned for more updates from the YS team!
