How do I ensure my engagement campaigns are accessible?

Creating an engagement campaign is all about connecting with your fans. But what happens if a fan physically can't read your form, click your buttons, or hear the audio in your video?

Digital accessibility is the practice of ensuring your online experiences can be used and enjoyed by everyone, regardless of their physical or cognitive abilities. Meeting these standards is not only the right thing to do so that no fan is left out, but it's also a legal requirement in many regions across the globe. 

Who Are You Designing For?

When we talk about accessibility guidelines (often referred to as WCAG, or Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), they are designed to accommodate a wide range of human experiences. Here is a high-level breakdown of what kinds of needs you're designing for when you make an accessible campaign:

• Visual Needs: This applies to people who are blind and use "screen reader" software that reads websites out loud to them. It also includes people with low vision who need text to be large and clear, and people with colour blindness who might not be able to tell the difference between certain colours (like red or green).
• Motor & Physical Needs: Some users cannot use a traditional mouse or touchscreen due to conditions like Parkinson’s, arthritis, or paralysis, for example. Instead, they navigate the web using only their keyboard (pressing Tab and Enter), voice commands, or specialized switches.
• Auditory Needs: Fans who are Deaf or hard of hearing cannot hear the audio in your promotional videos and rely on captions or sign language.
• Cognitive & Neurological Needs: This applies to a broad range of people, including those with ADHD, dyslexia, autism, and epilepsy, for example. These fans may benefit from clear, simple instructions, plenty of time to complete tasks, and the ability to pause distracting animations or flashing lights.
• Situational Needs: At the end of the day, accessibility helps everyone. A fan trying to read your campaign outside in bright sunlight needs high colour contrast. A fan on a noisy train needs video captions. 

Tradable Bits Helps You Start Strong

Our standard, unmodified campaign templates are built to be accessible right out of the box. They automatically meet WCAG 2.2 Level AA standards, which is the global legal benchmark for accessibility.

However, the Tradable Bits platform gives you the power to heavily customize your campaigns. The moment you start adding custom brand colours, uploading your own images, adding videos, or changing how a quiz works, it becomes your responsibility to ensure those changes don't accidentally create barriers for your fans.

How to Keep Your Campaign Accessible

As you create and customize your campaign, keep these simple but important factors in mind:

1. Colours and Contrast

Fans with low vision or colour blindness benefit from a strong contrast between the text colour and the background. 

• Always avoid light gray text on a white background, or dark text on a dark background.
• Don't rely on colour alone: If your campaign includes links, consider adding an underline rather than just setting the link font colour to a different hue.
  
  

2. Images and Descriptions

If a user is blind, their screen reader will tell them an image is there, but it can't tell them what the image is unless you write out a description.

• Add "Alt Text" (alternative text) to all important images, like prize images or graphics with text on them. Describe exactly what is in the image so a screen reader can equip the fan with all the information.

3. Forms, Quizzes, and Buttons

Fans with motor impairments benefit from targets that are easier to hit, and fans with different cognitive or neurological experiences might need more time to think. 

• Button Size: Make sure all your buttons and checkboxes are large enough to easily tap with a thumb on a mobile phone.
• Reconsider the countdown: Before adding strict time limits or countdown timers to quizzes and forms, give this some careful consideration. Rushing the fan can make the campaign tough to complete for someone who needs a little extra time to read or navigate. Note: Removing time limits is a requirement if you want to achieve the highest standard of accessibility, Level AAA.
  
  

4. Moving Elements and Video

For some, rapidly moving graphics can trigger motion sickness or seizures, and videos without text leave out many members of your audience.

• Pause: If you have embedded videos in a campaign, there always needs to be a way for the user to pause or hide it.
• Always Caption Videos: Any embedded video needs closed captions. (Note: To meet the highest AAA compliance standard, you'd also need to provide a sign-language interpretation video).
  
  

Helpful Resources

To help you check your custom campaign’s accessibility compliance before launch, we recommend keeping these resources on hand:

WebAIM Contrast Checker 

You can plug in your colour hex codes to this handy tool to verify if your text-to-background contrast passes AA and AAA standards.

The official W3C reference that details all success criteria required to meet varying levels of accessibility compliance.

Still need assistance? Please reach out to your Customer Success Team or contact support@tradablebits.com