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Blog posted by: Stephanie Hill, Head of GCS Curriculum, 23 May 2022.

Effective communication begins with knowing your audience.

Last Thursday, 19 May, was Global Accessibility Awareness Day, a day to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access/inclusion and people with different disabilities. 

We’ve put together some of the GCS activities about accessibility advocacy, awareness and training done for the profession in the past 2 years.

Accessible communications guidance

Following on from our successful guide: Publishing accessible social media campaigns, we published resources about Accessible communications that everyone can use. It was successful as one of our most viewed guides on the website in 2020.

Two of our more recent pieces of guidance have been written in partnership with subject matter experts. 

• Adding an audio description to your videos by the Government Equality Office (GEO)
• Planning, creating and publishing accessible website content was developed by the Government Digital Service (GDS) in partnership with the Government Communication Service (GCS) and the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO)

Learning about accessibility: live and on-demand

We know there’s more to do to improve accessibility in government communications, so continue to run training and awareness sessions. For example: “Ask me anything about accessibility”. This was done in collaboration with government experts from GDS, GEO and Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO). 

In the summer, we delivered another comms exchange with a panel from the Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA), CDDO and the BBC, “Building an accessibility culture”.

Accessibility in practice

We launched the GCS curriculum last year and digital accessibility is part of our essential learning. We offer a short video Digital accessibility: best-practice essentials to be on-demand online, and it’s our most popular video yet.

We also cover in more details the legal accessibility requirements with Digital accessibility for government communicators, delivered by CDDO and GDS.

We’ve published blog posts to help people implement best practice techniques to apply digital accessibility to their work.

The Government Communication Service is committed to continually raising awareness but also sharing and implementing best practices.

Communication is forever evolving and accessible communication benefits everyone. We need to make sure everyone can participate in the debate at the same time. 

Go further

Check the following blog posts and government partners who help develop guidance:

• Are these the most asked questions about accessibility?
• Link shorteners: the long and short of why you shouldn’t use them
• Census 2021: creating an accessible and inclusive campaign
• Making your comms clear and inclusive on the Civil Service blog
• Government Equality Office (GEO)
• Government Digital Service (GDS) 
• Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO)