The need to be accessible is essential to all organisations, but especially so within healthcare – to ensure that everyone has equal access without barriers.
As NHS employees, we prioritise accessibility on every project and we understand how important it is for healthcare providers to meet accessibility requirements in everything that they do.
Here are a few examples of what we’re doing to embed this culture and to promote accessibility across our work:
HTML webpages are preferable to PDFs, as a screen reader allows a user to change colour and font size, in ways that you cannot generally do with a PDF. However, if it is decided that a PDF is the route to go down, we’ll provide you with an accessible PDF as a matter of course.
This involves such things as setting a logical reading order, establishing a ratio of high contrast colours, providing Alt-text to images, setting up paragraph styles, adding descriptive links, and specifying a document title and description in the meta data.
Lights, camera, CLOSED CAPTIONS, action!
All our films include closed captions (where appropriate), allowing the YouTube viewer to increase the point size, change the colour contrast, and even convert the captions into the language of their choice.
We have developed a variety of styles for the provision of easy read leaflets. Below is one example produced as part of our ReadyforParenthood campaign which involved a series of focus groups in collaboration with the Elfrida Society, attended by parents with a learning disability and/or autism, who provided us with valuable input and insight.
We work with a number of partners to be able to manage the whole translation process.
It’s often a good idea to translate material that has already been produced in an easy read format, as with this Sexual assault and sexual abuse leaflet, which is available in 12 different languages from the Migrant Help UK website.
The examples above are only a snapshot of what NHS Creative can do. You can see more on our wider portfolio, or view how we can provide dedicated support in any of the following specialist areas: