Captivating through Captioning

Risk Aware Cultures

… and other times security awareness is made better through accessibility

In Security Awareness, we spend a lot of time developing content and activities to get people to pay attention to cybersecurity.  We put out videos, we host speakers, we create gamified training opportunities, really anything that we can think of that can grab your attention for a few minutes. When we do these activities, are we also thinking about how all of our employees are receiving that information?

By spending time designing our messages for accessibility, we often find that the messages are enriched for all. Increasing accessibility can in turn increase comprehension (including for people with English as a second language), increase findability, and increase traffic to our sites. 

Here are a few examples of how I’ve increased accessibility through our Security Awareness program at Code42:

  1. Burn captions in on every video – this makes the captions always available regardless of where it’s posted
    1. There are many ways to get auto caption files. Additional curation is necessary, but the bulk of the work is done automatically.
  2. Transcripts for trainings are available
    1. In addition to providing an alternate way for users to engage with the training, it also increases findability when people are looking for information later
  3. Record audio for  Slack posts that are longer than 3 sentences and post it along with the text
    1. An additional delivery method can help people retain the content based on their learning style
  4. Review how screen readers read your content
    1. Especially when I’m posting on Slack and using emojis, I consider how a screen reader will read the emojis I’ve used
  5. Make sure there is adequate contrast between colors used and that color isn’t the only indicator of differences (e.g. using different icons to indicate change)

This isn’t just for awareness and training either.  Whenever we deploy a message in our organizations, are we considering accessibility? What I’ve found is that if I increase the accessibility of the message, more people comment on how they didn’t realize they needed this in their life.  We shouldn’t wait for the employees who need accessibility to reach out and ask. We should just do it because it makes us all better together.