We’re happy to announce the launch of our new MOOC: Get Started with TorTalk – Optimise Digital Accessibility with Text-to-Speech.
This course is created for institutions that already use TorTalk, and helps staff and educators understand how the tool works, how it supports students with reading difficulties, and how to integrate it effectively in everyday learning environments.
What’s the Tor Talk course about?
Understanding dyslexia and its impact on reading
Practical use of TorTalk features (OCR, speed adjustment, reading from PDFs, web, and imagea
How to spread and support the use of TorTalk at your institution
Tips on active reading with text-to-speech
Why digital accessibility matters.
Making learning accessible is essential, but not all digital material is perfectly formatted. TorTalk stands out because it works even when materials are not designed correctly. With OCR and flexible reading options, it helps users access text in real-world conditions – not just ideal ones.
The course is available now and can be ordered by your institution.
Want to know more? Get in touch or visit: tortalk.se
If you’d like to offer a TorTalk course at your university or within your organization, feel free to get in touch we’ll be happy to tell you more and help tailor the course to your needs.
https://usercontent.one/wp/imgplay.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/AdobeStock_774699805-scaled.jpeg?media=177615764317072560Adele Edlinghttps://usercontent.one/wp/imgplay.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/img_play_box_288x288.png?media=1776157643Adele Edling2025-04-30 12:54:142026-04-30 10:49:17New Online Course Launched – Get Started with TorTalk
How to Get Started with Accessibility in Organizations
Accessibility is a good business practice and soon required by law, as mentioned in a previous blog post. The same blog post also explains how to get started with accessibility as an individual, but how do you handle accessibility for an organisation? Let us show you what we at IMG Play have done for accessibility at KTH and how you can apply it to your own organisation!
How to Educate Employees on Accessibility in Organizations
Accessibility requires the cooperation and support of your employees and your stakeholders, so the first step is to inform and educate them. IMG Play has mainly been involved in educating employees, but involving stakeholders is too important to leave out of this blog post. Your stakeholders are probably mostly interested in the business case of accessibility for your organisation. To create one, consider as many areas as possible, for example that accessibility will do the following:
Increase general usability: designing for accessibility often leads to unintended, but welcomed, improvements for all users, see the Curb cut effect (wikipedia.org).
Reach a large, ignored user base: 15% of the world’s population are disabled, and the number is growing as we live longer (World Report on Disability (who.int).
Minimise legal risk. As mentioned earlier, there are legal requirements for accessibility already and more specific laws will soon come into effect.
Reduce the costs of late adaptation, both in time and money. If accessibility is an afterthought you’ll have to implement it around inaccessible features, which is not cost-effective.
Day-to-Day Accessibility Tasks in Organizations
Your employees will be more interested in what they actually have to do in their day-to-day work, so they will require training. We have been heavily involved in this at KTH, as we helped create their online, self-study course on digital accessibility. The self-study course are split into the following parts:
Information about why accessibility is important, including several recorded interviews with disabled students and employees at KTH.
How to create accessible text documents and to write accessible text. Covers both the laws and general recommendations on how it should be done.
How to handle visual communication, such as images, graphs and colour.
The required steps to make video and audio accessible and how to do it efficiently.
Set goals for your organization
When establishing the accessibility goals for your organisation, it’s essential to specify what conformance levels you aim to meet of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These levels provide clear benchmarks for progress and ensure consistency across all departments. You should also specify any other standards your organisation will be using, for example for plain language.
However, accessibility is measured by how well your users can use your product, not by how well it conforms to WCAG. Alfred Korzybski famously said “the map is not the territory”, and here we will say that the checklist is not the experience of using your product. They are, of course, related and the WCAG checklist is very useful, but you need broader goals than just WCAG compliance. These accessibility goals are best formulated with the help of accessibility experts, so we can help you! Contact-us-länk
Create templates and standards
Simplify for those creating content, so the easiest path is to create accessible material. A tried and tested way to do this is to create accessible templates for the most common content, for each system. Have the templates be useful and the default choice. For example, we created an accessible template for KTH’s course platform, Canvas, and an “accessibility checklist”. We have also helped create a standard web layout for parts of KTH’s intranet.
Keep up to date
As with most things, you can never fully “complete” accessibility simply because the world is always changing. Your organisation need a process to, for example, keep up to date on new:
legislation
standards
assistive technology.
With robust reviewing practices this should be easy to keep up to date. At KTH, we have customised their yearly review of their web pages to better fit with specific teams, and also created a way to handle internal feedback on the same web pages.
Ask for feedback from users
No matter how much you study and work with creating accessible products, you will always know less than those who have to use said products daily. Remember to involve people with relevant and different disabilities. Ask for their input and expertise, early and as often as required.
Contact us for more information and further help with acessability in your organisation.
https://usercontent.one/wp/imgplay.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/AdobeStock_212750640-scaled.webp?media=17761576439882560Adele Edlinghttps://usercontent.one/wp/imgplay.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/img_play_box_288x288.png?media=1776157643Adele Edling2024-05-31 10:18:412026-04-30 11:53:48Accessibility best practices for organizations
To make a service or content accessible is to ensure that everyone can access and use said service or content, no matter their disability. While it is generally a good business practice to allow your customers to use your service, it will also be required by law in Sweden for digital products and services by 2025 (Tillgänglighetsdirektivet (regeringen.se)
Here we will try to make digital accessibility seem less difficult and arcane for beginners. To start with, we’ll show you some examples of how IMG Play supports digital accessibility at KTH. Then, we will give you tips and recommendations on how to get started on your own.
IMG Plays accessibility support at KTH
For governmental agencies in Sweden, digital accessibility is already required by law (specifically the DOS law). That is why IMG Play has been working with KTH to improve their digital accessibility. We have supported KTH to create and maintain the following:
Educational material for staff. For example:
A self-study course detailing how to create accessible digital documents.
Guides to creating accessible videos and how to caption them.
Tips on how to get started, the so-called “low-hanging fruit”.
Templates and standards for the intranet pages governed by the e-learning team.
A checklist of basic digital accessibility, for teachers to use when creating courses.
Ongoing support to teachers on how to improve the accessibility of their digital course material.
How you can get started (as an individual)
While accessibility should be prioritised at an organisational level, there are things you can do as an individual to get started. You should start simple and work to incorporate your knowledge as early as possible in future projects. Also, ask for support from your managers, they should have a vested interest in making your product as accessible as possible. There are more details about all of this under the following headings.
Start simple, with the “low-hanging fruit”
Some accessibility problems we call “low-hanging fruits” as they are simple to fix, in that they can be fixed by individuals with minimal training. These “low-hanging fruits” can usually be fixed after a product is completed, although it’s more efficient to make sure they never appear at all.
Some examples of low-hanging fruit:
Use the correct heading levels without skipping.
Write meaningful link text.
Avoid only using colour to convey information.
Consider the reading order for screen readers (both in the text and in the code).
For more, we recommend you read the guides created by the Web Accessibility Initiative for designers, writers and developers: Tips for Getting Started (w3.org).
Incorporate accessibility at the start of future projects
When working with accessibility, you will often use checklists to make sure you meet the criteria. However, this makes it easy to fall into the mindset that accessibility is the last step, that you go through a checklist and fix any problems you find before shipping your product. This is the least efficient way to make your product accessible.
You should consider accessibility in the planning stage, otherwise you might have to redesign portions or all of your product. For example, if you have text with images of data tables in them, then the accessible version is to remove the images and add them as tables. Hopefully your product can render tables properly already, but will it scale properly to mobile phones or with 200% zoom? In the best case scenario this is just hours of wasted time, in the worst case scenario the product will have to be fully redesigned.
While you as an individual might have limited control over an entire project, you can apply this mindset to your content. For example, you can ask yourself:
What parts of WCAG are relevant for this project and what level are we trying to reach?
Will users be able to navigate with the most common tools? (Mouse, touch-screen, keyboard, keyboard and screen reader).
What is the standard way to solve [problem] in an accessible way?
Are there any templates you can use?
What tools will be used in testing and how often will the product be tested?
Tip! Learn why some solutions are accessible and some are not, it will greatly help you foresee future problems.
common accessibility icons
Ask for support from your managers
There is a lot you can do as an individual, but accessibility is easier to achieve when everyone is helping. Ask your managers what can be done to create accessible templates and routines, and how to best spread the workload. Talking about accessibility will also raise awareness of it and will help you find existing solutions from others.
https://usercontent.one/wp/imgplay.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/AdobeStock_445130024-scaled.webp?media=177615764317072560Adele Edlinghttps://usercontent.one/wp/imgplay.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/img_play_box_288x288.png?media=1776157643Adele Edling2024-04-16 15:11:012026-04-30 12:08:52How IMG Play helped KTH with digital accessibility, and what you can learn from it
