Accessibility is an important aspect of the Kenneth Rainin Foundation’s diversity, equity and inclusion work. Over the past few years, we have built our expertise and committed more resources to it. The launch of our redesigned website in July 2023 was a milestone in this journey, as we collaborated with Mission Minded and Perkins Access to make the site more accessible. Since then, we’ve continued making improvements and want to share updates, including a new pledge we’re making and some recent accolades.
Improving Our Communications Tools
In the year since our website launched, we’ve continued to work with our partners to improve the accessibility of all our content. Our goal is for our communications to be accessible to more visitors, including people who are blind, have low vision, are hard of hearing or have motor impairments that affect their ability to use a mouse. But we also know that prioritizing accessibility helps everyone in our audiences better understand and interact with us.
Accessible Website News
We’re happy to share that our new website is award-winning. In April, we were thrilled to receive the 2024 PRNEWS Digital Awards for Site Redesign and Accessibility as well as a 2024 American Business Awards Gold Stevie for Website Redesign.
While these awards aren’t our primary aim, they serve as meaningful recognition for our commitment to accessibility.
Creating Accessible Brand Colors
All of our brand colors now meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA compliance, which requires a 4.5:1 contrast ratio. This ratio ensures there’s clear distinction between foreground and background elements, which is especially important for users with visual impairments. When we redesigned our website, we updated the Metallic Blue color in our brand palette to better contrast with white. The change was subtle and imperceptible to most. Recently, with help from our friends at Mission Minded, we changed the palette for our Education Program from gold to orange for the same reason—a significant change in this case. Both of these new colors are reflected in our website, newsletter and across all other communications materials. We had no idea going into this work that we would need to update our brand palette, but the contrast is very important, as lighter colors overlaid with white text is harder to read.
Prioritizing Staff Learning And Growth
While most of our accessibility work to date has been focused within the Communications department, it has expanded to other teams across the Foundation as well. Our Program teams have begun including accommodations language in event materials as well as providing American Sign Language interpretation and live captioning for online events. And in 2023, our Human Resources Department collected demographic data on disability status for our staff, senior leaders and Board. We have added this information to our website because as we work toward greater disability inclusion across the philanthropic sector, it’s important to share benchmark data to assess our progress.
This year, Geoff Freed, Director of Digital Accessibility Consulting at Perkins Access, is sharing his expertise with all Foundation staff. In June, he provided a training on creating accessible PDFs from Word documents and he returned this month for a session on PowerPoint presentations. It’s been wonderful to see staff in all departments participate in these learning opportunities as they begin to understand how accessibility can be implemented in their own work.
Formalizing Our Commitment
We have signed onto the Disability & Philanthropy Forum’s Disability Inclusion Pledge. Our Diversity and Inclusion Strategies in Communications (DISC) Group, comprised of representatives from our Program and Grants Management teams, has been evaluating the eight action items in the pledge, which involve departments across the Foundation. We were delighted to see that we’ve already made progress in some areas. We are in the process of engaging staff around these collective commitments. This type of collaborative approach to decision making is part of our ethos and will ensure we’re successful in completing the action items.
Signing onto the pledge is an important step that signals our commitment to disability inclusion and advancing this work. We look forward to learning from organizations like Ford Foundation, PEAK Grantmaking and Center for Cultural Innovation who have already taken the pledge and may be further along in the journey.
Stay tuned for more updates on what we’re learning and how we’re continuing to improve our practices.
