Less Chatter, More Matter: The Communications Podcast

#95 Inclusive communications: how and why you should do it (ft. Matisse Hamel-Nelis)

• Season 1 • Episode 95

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In this episode of the Less Chatter, More Matter podcast, we picked the brain of award-winning communications and digital accessibility expert, Matisse Hamel-Nelis, on all things accessibility and inclusivity.

In recognition of International Day of People with a Disability, December 3rd, we wanted to get the run down on all things accessibility, and what we could do or implement as best practice for communicators in order to make a difference.

Our discussion covered some practical tips for making social media, documents, and videos more accessible, alongside the role of AI in accessibility, and the importance of inclusive language. Matisse also emphasised the need for continuous learning and engagement with the accessibility community to improve communication practices.

So, listen in now to get some quick and easy tips on making your content more accessible to over 1.6 million people across the globe.

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Take a moment to think about any audience you communicate with. Maybe it's customers, employees, a large team, a sporting club, whatever it might be. Now imagine them all standing in front of you, whether that's six people or 6, 000 people. Got that image? Great. Now, imagine that every sixth person is lit up with a spotlight. Have you got that? Does that feel like a fairly sizable proportion of your audience? Here's the thing. Those people are likely to live with a significant disability. That's right. According to the World Health Organization, one in six people worldwide live with a significant disability and millions more live with other or even temporary disability. Now let's go back to that picture of your audience in your mind. If every sixth person couldn't engage with your communications because they aren't accessible, what would you do? How would those people feel? Well, 3rd of December is International Day of People with a Disability. So it's a great time to focus on why and how we make our communications much more inclusive and accessible and get the ball rolling, which is why I've invited Matisse Hamel-Nelis to be our guest on this week's episode of Less Chatter, More Matter. Matisse is an award winning communications and digital accessibility consultant based in Toronto, Canada. With extensive public relations experience, she is also a part time professor and the program coordinator for the Durham College Public Relations Graduate Certificate Program, which she developed to reflect today's communications industry's real world skills and values. Matisse is also the founder and host of PR and Lattes, a podcast and blog that offers a platform for communications professionals to share insights and ideas on public relations, marketing, and accessibility. Deeply committed to fostering inclusion and accessibility, she brings these values to all of her work. Matisse is also certified as an accessible document specialist and a certified professional in accessibility core competencies through the International Association of Accessibility Professionals. She is an recognised authority on accessibility in digital communications. She's also currently co authoring a book on accessible communications with Lisa Remus, which will provide actionable insights for creating inclusive and impactful messaging in a digital first world. I can't wait to get my hands on that. And as you'll see in today's episode, we cover a whole lot of information about accessible communication. Matisse shares her why, but she also shares loads of tips on how you can get Started to make sure your comms is more accessible. And of course we chat about the role of AI in accessible communications. I loved this chat. I think you will too. I'm sure you will learn so much about it. So without further ado, here's Matisse.

Mel:

Well, hi Matisse and welcome to the show.

Matisse:

Thank you so much for having me. I am such a big fan. I feel like I'm a longtime listener, first time caller.

Mel:

Oh, it looks the same here. The feeling is very mutual. Uh, where are you joining us from today?

Matisse:

Just outside of Toronto, Canada. Right.

Mel:

So a bit chilly.

Matisse:

Um, it's getting there. It's getting there. It's warmer for an end of November than typical, but, uh, we're good. We're good.

Mel:

We're good. It's fine. So for our audience who may not have met you before, can you tell us a little bit about you? What do you do? How did you develop your expertise in that space?

Matisse:

For sure. So I'm Matisse Hamel-Nelis. Um, I run Matisse Nelis Consulting and I also am a program coordinator and a professor at Durham College for their PR program. Um, but my specialty, my niche, my area of expertise, if you will, is accessible communications. And that started shortly after I graduated from college and PR and I started working as a corporate communication specialist for a non profit, a national non profit here in Canada, that was focused on sight loss. And it was my second day and people who've heard me speak at conferences know this story and they all laugh and gasp. And, and, and. Terror, because like, oh, that could have been me. Um, but it was my second day on the job, and at this point, it was when X was still Twitter, and Twitter only had 140 characters. And so, I was asked to put out a tweet, and I thought, sure, a tweet, easy, 140 characters. So, I found a stat, and I put out a hashtag, D Y K for did you know, and whatever the stat was. Within 10 minutes, one of my colleagues with sight loss called me. I thought it was very nice, you know, Oh, you're new to the team. And then he's like, By the way, did you just tweet? And I thought as a communicator, Oh my god, I have a spelling mistake or a grammar mistake. Lo and behold, no, it was my hashtag, DYK, which was apparently being read by screen readers, for people who have sight loss as dick or dike. Um, so after the panic, and I wasn't like, so I'm going to get fired and lose my job. Two days. Awesome. Um, he was, super generous and sweet and just said, you know, just remove the tweet, rewrite the tweet using the full words. And then he explained to me, so assistive technology doesn't actually read hashtags that are acronyms the way we think. It tries to make them into words. And that's where my issue came in with DYK for Did You Know? So in that moment, I sort of thought, well, If I didn't know this and I'm supposed to be a professional communicator, what else don't I know? And that's when I just essentially immersed myself in anything that I might touch as a communicator, how can I ensure it's accessible? And that was 10 years ago. So, it's become a passion for me ever since.

Mel:

Yeah, I was going to say, like, you've obviously moved on from that organisation since then and you could well have, you know, sort of left those lessons behind. So what have you done to kind of take that with you and keep building on those skills?

Matisse:

For sure. So, um, during that time, while I was at that organisation, I was there for about five and a half years. Um, I had the opportunity to take this incredible program at Mohawk College, um, which was one of, one of the only one of its kind at the time, uh, in North America called Accessible Media Production. So, um, And in that one year certificate program, I learned and immersed myself in absolutely anything and everything that had to do with digital communications. So accessible documents, things that people don't think about. My PDFs, are they accessible? My Word documents, my PowerPoints, that sort of thing. Social media, accessible podcasting, um, plain language. How do we write in an accessible manner? The legislations that sort of guide us to ensure that we are being compliant. Because at the end of the day, everyone sort of looks at, well, are we going to get sued? It's not so much that, is it the right thing to do? It's the, am I going to get sued thing to do, right? Um, so I started there and then I've just, like I said, following various, uh, advocates and accessibility professionals. I've just immersed myself in that community, in that space. Um, and I'm a big proponent of you're going to make mistakes, but if you learn from them, that is where it's going to be so beneficial. Um, because we're not going to be perfect. We're all learning this at the same time, right? Um, and like I said, it's just been a 10 year growth and it continues to keep growing and learning and learning from others who may be more specialised in certain spaces than others. So learning those, how do we overcome those situations and that sort of thing. Like I said, just sort of immerse myself in continuing to learn as much as I can as, um, things change and progress and improve.

Mel:

Yeah. And look, I, I totally resonate with that journey of growth, right? One, one thing I like to think about is if you think If you think you've reached perfect, then you've stopped learning. Cause none of us ever going to be perfect, but myself personally, you know, having learned from people like yourself and Kelly Thibodeau, for example, you know, it's really changed a lot of how I do things, simple things like you're saying, like hashtags, but having image descriptions, making sure that people can navigate through a website, all those things. But literally just this morning, before we hopped on this call, I was on a call with a client. We'd just held a big event for them. Last week, a big offsite town hall for the staff and that particular room had two big screens either side. So I thought, cool, we're sweet. But some of the feedbacks come through saying, Oh, look, from the back of the room, it was actually really hard to read what was on the slides. It's like, Oh yeah, of course. So, you know, again, as you say, just one of those, Those moments where you're like, right, what do we learn from this? How do we make it better next time? And so it's little, little things that all add up. But I guess my question to you is, you know, you've, you've immersed yourself in this space, as you said, but why has it become important to you to educate others on accessible and inclusive communication?

Matisse:

That's a great question. So for me, um, given where I worked for five and a half years, I have some incredible relationships with people who are blind, deaf blind, partially sighted, hard of hearing, um, and other, a variety of other disabilities. Those are close friends and confidants and that sort of thing. And to watch them, try to engage with content in any way, shape or form that I can simply click on with a mouse and read because I can see with my, you know, quote unquote, assistive tech, my glasses, but I can see it. No problem. But for them to then try to navigate it with a screen reader or other assistive technology and just saying, I have no idea what's going on. I can't see what you're seeing. For me that's, that breaks my heart, but it also makes me want to try to improve our industry as professional communicators. It shouldn't be a... an extra, it shouldn't be an afterthought, it should just be, okay, so I'm creating a document. I'm creating a Word document. Let me use my paragraph styles in the top navigation and just add proper structure so anybody who is using this document can access it. Um, you know, on social media, there's this assumption or this preconceived notion that, for example, people with sight loss don't use social media or things like Instagram. One of my closest friends, Ashley Nemeth, she's deafblind. She is, uh, you know, she's an influencer in her own right, from a content perspective, talking about deafblindness and her experience with her guide dog and that sort of thing. And she loves Instagram, right? So these, these ideas that people with disability maybe don't want to engage with content when, when it's actually, they want to engage, We're putting up those barriers, and unintentionally, I always say unintentionally, I don't think anybody's doing it maliciously, um, but unintentionally putting up these barriers is a big issue., 1. 6 billion People in the world have identified as having a disability that's about according to a recent survey, 17 trillion dollar spending potential between the people with disabilities plus their friends plus their family.

Mel:

Wow...

Matisse:

Right, so if you are sitting there saying, you know I don't need to have an accessible website because somebody who is blind may not visit my website for example. Um, let's say you sell cars - well, what if that person with sight loss actually has a 16 year old daughter who is now eager to get her own car? She's not paying for it. It's probably gonna be the parents and if they need to actually look at the content, like, you know, look at the website to see is it a good car? Does it pass certain checks? But they can't access it. We should be able to get the same content as somebody, you know, who may have a disability. There shouldn't be a barrier there in any way, shape or form.

Mel:

I would agree.

Matisse:

You don't know, right? So. That's sort of the big thing there for me. It's, I want to make sure the people I care about, the people I love have access to information and have agency when they access that information versus having to ask somebody else to read it for them.

Mel:

I think that raises a really good point. As you said, you know, as communicators, we don't wake up in the morning and think, Oh, today I'm going to make my communications completely unaccessible for people, right? Um, but if we take a truly audience centred approach, which, you know, is kind of a fundamental baseline for good communication. Then these are the things we should be thinking about is that audience, you know, how do they interact with this? You raised, uh, a ...a point there too, about, you know, this idea that maybe people with a disability don't use Instagram, for example, what are some of the common myths that impact people with disability interacting with communication?

Matisse:

Yeah, that no matter what, um, there's this assumption that if I create a Word document, Microsoft Word tends to be sort of the go to right now in terms of document processing or, um, word processing software, as long as I put my content in there. People can read it, no problem. Well, if it's a very large document Think about how we read a book, for example, um, we might skip chapters, uh, because we can see what the chapter, what the chapters are called, and by ensuring that the documents we're creating have that same structure using those paragraph styles, if you will, um, or the styles pane in Microsoft Word, uh, to add in a heading one for your title, a heading two for your subsection, a heading three for the sub subsection. It allows... you know, people who are using assistive tech to have that navigation, an opportunity to just skip through a document like we would if just sort of scrolling down or that sort of thing. Um, but you know, the misconception of a Word document and all just regular text is fine. Not so much. Um, on social media, like you mentioned, well, it's Instagram, people with sight loss don't use it. Not true. Um, that assistive things or accessible tactics and, um, that we might apply to various communications, whether it's videos, podcasting, and that sort of thing, that they're only for people with disabilities. So not true. I have been caught many a times on a train, forgetting my headphones and wanting to watch a video. And if it wasn't for captions, I would be completely at a loss. Um, there's this, the biggest misconception I think is that when we design, when we create, when we do anything, we think of the majority versus thinking about the outliers, right? Think of kerb cuts, you know, people think like, Oh, you know, that's for people who are in wheelchairs. Right. Sure, but what if you're on a skateboard and you have to go from sidewalk to sidewalk? Easy enough to get back on, right? If you have a stroller, it's easy, it's easy to bring up your stroller. If you have a shopping cart, like a little shopping buggy that you need to roll, it's great, it's fantastic. If you're somebody with sight loss and you're using a white cane, it can give you the indicator that that's the end of the kerb. There's so many different items and ideas that come from when you start designing and creating things for the outliers that then benefit everyone and here's the misconception, the biggest misconception, I think. People don't think they use assistive tech. And it's not true. One of my friends and dear colleagues from my previous role, um, was blind and we were at an event, at a conference, and we were in a hotel and I went to her room to go pick her up and she says, do you need me to turn on your assistive tech for you? And I said, what the heck are you talking about? She goes, you're sighted. You're retinally dependent. You need light. Let me turn on the lights for you. I don't see any. I don't see light or darkness. I don't need the light. So for her, the room was dark. And she's like, this is your assistive tech. And I was like... Touche. That is it. Right? So it's, it's realising that we're using these accessibility features all the time. And what we do, the tapping feature on a smartphone, like to take your photo, that's an accessibility adaptation so that people who, you know, need to do that because they can't see where the button is on the screen are able to interact with the phone a certain way. So we're using these accessibility features in ways that, you know, we maybe wouldn't have thought of if it wasn't for us designing for those outliers, those people with disabilities. And I think if we do that across the board. We're going to have such innovation in different spaces that we never thought we could have before.

Mel:

Yeah, that's brilliant. And some really great examples there too. So it sounds like, you know, there's a lot out there that even most of us would potentially not even be aware that is assistive technology. Um, you know, I even think about Siri, for example, you know, I'm using voice activated tech, uh, on your phone, you know, yeah, that is a prime example of something a lot of us use every day, but it is, it is assistive tech at the end of the day. Right. So let's bring it back to communication specifically. What are some of your top tips for how we can make our communication more accessible to more people?

Matisse:

The easiest and sort of low hanging fruit would be ensuring your social media is accessible. Um, so, you know, easiest thing, your hashtags. Using Pascal case, where the first letter of each word in a multi word hashtag is capitalised. So if it was like the hashtag something like this, it'd be capital S in something, capital L in like, and capital T in this. It not only makes it easier for you know, people with, uh, who are using screen readers to understand what you're saying, but just the general public. Especially nowadays when everyone's creating their own hashtags, and you're like, I have no idea what that's supposed to say, unless it's a Pascal case. Um, the next is image descriptions or alt text. Um, essentially the same, and alt text is a bit more concise as to what's happening in the image versus an image description is more in depth and providing if you will, a story of the image, um, based on the context of the rest of the content in your caption. Um, but when it comes to an image description or alt text, also ensuring that it's not just embedded in your social media posts, but also added into the main caption itself, unless you're, you are using X or Blue Sky, um, there, when you embed it, it actually provides a little alt badge on X, it's on the bottom left hand corner and on Blue Sky, it's on the bottom right hand corner that you can click on and anybody can see what that alt text or image description is. But for platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram, you want to also put it in the main caption itself to ensure that people who aren't necessarily listening to it, but maybe are using a magnifier if they have low vision, or a cognitive disability, can better understand what the graphic or illustration is meant to say and describe. Um, for your videos, captions, love captions, captions are everybody's friend. Um, there's two types, there's open caption to ensure everybody has it, those are burned in. Um, or closed caption, if you are a YouTube, you know, vlogger, let's say, or you post a lot of content on YouTube. Make sure you're using closed captions, so that's a separate file, either an SRT file, VTT file, that sort of thing that you upload with your video, or you can have them be auto generated by YouTube itself, but just make sure you edit them so your, your brand has punctuation and is spelled correctly, um, and the reason why I say closed captions are so great on YouTube is because it provides more opportunities for the end user to actually change the style, the colour, the, the, the highlighting, and even the location of the captions on the screen. So imagine you have your screen magnified a bit, you can now move the captions so they're within your field of view. Right?

Mel:

That's brilliant.

Matisse:

Yes, agreed, agreed. Uh, colour contrast, that's a big thing. In a lot of legislation, so you're going to hear, we follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or what I like to refer to as WCAG. W C A G. And there, they typically refer to level AA compliance. That means that your foreground colour, so your text colour, if you will, and your background colour, have a ratio of 4. 5 to 1 for regular text. There's a great free app that you can download for both Mac and PCs. It's from TPGI. It is the colour contrast analyzer. It is my go to for literally everything. And it'll tell you how it complies, and then it also shows you what it looks like when you have that colour on top of the other colour. So you can really see it both from an image, uh, perspective as well as, um, text. Finally, just, you know, when you're going through stuff, ask questions. That's, that's my biggest piece of advice with any of this. It's progress over perfection. My biggest takeaway for anybody would be start following the hashtag A11Y, which stands for accessibility. It's A, the 11 letters between A and Y, And why? And it also looks like ally. So that's sort of a win there. Um, when you follow that hashtag, you can ask, you can see what the community is saying, what we're talking about.

Mel:

Great tips there. So a few tips for social media in terms of having those image descriptions, uh, the, uh, colour contrasts on your web sites and those sorts of things as well. Your captions, love all of that. And you actually answered my next question. Which came out of all of that, which was, how do you keep up? So, um, follow the hashtag is my key takeaway from that one.

Matisse:

Yeah. Yes. And ask questions, simply posting like, Hey, I have no idea how to do this. Anybody have a clue? People start tagging other people and they'll be able to answer the question. It's the accessibility community and the disability community are so cool. Open and welcoming in that regard where it's, we want to help because we know if we start to promote and educate versus attack people for not doing it properly, we're able to actually have more people embrace accessibility overall and make the digital space more inclusive to everybody.

Mel:

Hmm. I love that. So, um, I guess, and that also brought me to another question, just, it's been ruminating in the back of my mind, this whole conversation is about the use of language as well when it comes to people with disabilities. So I know in Australia, we have people with disability, Australia, they have a language guide on their website, which is wonderful. I love that guide. But... and from your own perspective, what's a good way to make sure that the language that you use around disability is on point as well?

Matisse:

That's a great question. In a lot of cases, and in speaking with a lot of people with disabilities, everybody has their own preference, if you will. So I typically will use the person first language. Um, so it's a person with sight loss, a person with limb difference, that sort of thing. Um, but at the same time, we see something like Mattel releasing blind Barbie. Right. And in talking to people who are blind and part of the sight loss community, they're saying, that's perfect, you know, you're not going to buy a Barbie that says Barbie who was blind, right? Yeah. And so the perspective is there's a time and a place for everything. However, there are some terminologies We want to get away from, right, like special needs. The needs aren't special. They're just a bit different, right? I can do, I can write a Word document my way, and somebody with sight loss or, you know, mobility issues or, you know, limb difference or whatever the case may be might engage or write something a little bit differently. Using their own assistive tech. It doesn't mean it's a special need. It's just done a little bit differently. Um, you know, handicapped, avoiding that type of language as well. Um, the one that I find really interesting, and I always hear debates on is like impairment. So it's when you are, let's say, working and writing about somebody with a disability, asking them, how do you prefer that I reference this? Because again, it's their agency, it's what they live, it's what they experience, how do they want it to be referenced, and then kind of going from there.

Mel:

And I love that. It's, it really is just asking the questions. Right. And I feel like, uh, no matter what sort of community you belong to, the fact that somebody cares enough to ask is, um, really validating as well. One last question before we wrap up is what. When we've touched a little bit on this already, but what role do you see AI playing in accessible comms? So for example, um, we talked a little bit about assistive tech and for my, my niece in particular, she is a ASD. She's got dyslexia, those sorts of things. So she really relies on like voice to text, for example, to be able to send text messages, write assignments, those sorts of things, but that's, I know, just the tip of the iceberg and AI is evolving so quickly. What are you seeing?

Matisse:

I am such a huge fan of what AI can be and could be and hoping will be. Fingers crossed. Um, you know, right now we hear people say, oh, I use it for alt text or image descriptions, and I sort of have to say it's a good starting point, but for now, because AI doesn't understand context, alt text might change or your images description might change based on your caption, however. If you need to transcribe something, I use Otter. ai for that all the time for meetings, just so it captures everything. I have ADHD and bipolar myself, and particularly from the ADHD perspective, if I'm in a meeting, something can just pop up on my screen. I'm like, ooh, look at me. And then I miss the important key parts. Like I said, you know, the auto generated captions on YouTube are essentially AI generated. And it gives you a great starting point so you're not starting from scratch and being like, Okay, this is going to take forever. You have a great starting point there. So the, there's so many cool different things happening, um, I'm just really excited for what the future holds. We're not there yet. Um, and I, that's always my caveat with people and they're like, Oh, but it can do this. It's like, yes, but, um, you know, certain flags that we have to sort of check and monitor. But I think it's going to be such a game changer when it, when we get more immersed from an accessibility and disability representation perspective that, um, it's going to really help people ensure that they are being accessible.

Mel:

Hugely. And I, I even was thinking the other day about, um, so I was just testing this out with Google Gemini, rewriting a paragraph in easy English as well. So, you know, again, it wasn't perfect, but if you aren't aware of how to write an easy English and you're time poor for now, maybe that's okay. Like it's enough to get you over that hump as well. It's getting better and better. So I have three questions that I ask every guest on the podcast. Are you ready for those?

Matisse:

I'm ready.

Mel:

She's ready. Let's go. All right. What is one of the best communication lessons you've ever learned and how did it change your approach to communication?

Matisse:

The best one I learned was you can't do it all yourself. Uh, and that took a, and I, I know a lot of people might say, Oh, I learned that lesson. That's not a problem for me, letting go and saying, okay, like this is, it's going to be okay if somebody else assists and that sort of thing was huge for me. Um, and so how it changed my approach was. I don't need to be the smartest in the room, and especially when you're starting off in your career, and you're like, no, I need to show, I need to prove myself. Prove yourself by knowing where you're not the smartest in the room, but bring those people who are in those areas together so that you can achieve great things. Um, again, going back to that constant learning perspective.

Mel:

Yeah. And that's a lesson I had to learn the hard way as well. Now we've may have touched on some of this already, but what's one of the, one thing you wish people would do more of or less of when communicating?

Matisse:

Ask questions, do more of the asking questions. It's okay to not know everything, um, like I said in my previous answer, but particularly when it comes to accessibility, I would love more people and more communicators to be accessible.

Mel:

Love it. And final question. Who do you turn to for communication advice?

Matisse:

So you are actually one of them, to be honest. I love your book. It's filled with post it notes, by the way. And I'm just like, oh, this, I need to go back and just read. Um, yourself, Kelly Reimers out of the UK, uh, Kelly Thibodeau, when we just need to chat about accessibility and just, you know, have you tried this, have you played with that? She's fantastic. I know she was a guest before on here as well.

Mel:

Yeah, I love Kelly, she's amazing.

Matisse:

There's so many. I, I feel like I just stalk a bunch of people on LinkedIn and just absorb their content and if I have questions, I can reach out. Um, but you know, there isn't really just one person, particularly being a professor, I have to know about so many different things. Mm. Um, but knowing that I have this incredible group, um, particularly through IABC, um, that I've been able to sort of cultivate and really learn from, um, I can, I know I can turn to them for advice and they're there to assist.

Mel:

Yeah. And it's, it's interesting you mentioned IABC too, because I've had a couple of guests on this podcast too. I would not have met if it weren't for IABC, so I first met you and Kelly or got to know you and Kelly at the world conference in Toronto. What was that? Two years ago or thereabouts almost.

Matisse:

Yeah.

Mel:

Yeah. And again, you know, building that network outside of Australia or outside of your own little bubble, exactly. Just bring so much more knowledge in. Like I learned from you guys all the time and would not have that opportunity, had we not, um, been part of that group. So yeah, really appreciate that.

Matisse:

Likewise.

Mel:

Now, in the meantime, if people want to get in touch with you and find out more about the work that you do, how can they find you?

Matisse:

For sure, so you can find me on my website, MatisseNielis. com, M A T I S S E N E L I S. com. You can find me on LinkedIn, Matisse Hamel-Nelis. Um, uh, you can find me, I'm trying to think of all the places.

Mel:

Well, you've got your, you've got your podcast too, PR and Lattes.

Matisse:

I have a podcast, PR and Lattes. There's a few places you can find me, um, PRandLattes. com is our website. Uh, it's a PR and communications blog and, uh, podcast where, you know, everything over a latte or a coffee. Always a good, a good thing.

Mel:

Love that.

Matisse:

And now I'm, I'm new to blue sky, um, metisneilis. com because you can actually change it to your website, which is really, really cool.

Mel:

Interesting.

Matisse:

Blue sky, very similar feeling from threads is what I've been getting so far. So yeah, give it a try.

Mel:

Interesting. Awesome. Well, thank you so much Matisse for your time today.

Matisse:

Thank you so much for having me.