Transcript: Making News Accessible

Britne Jenke (00:00)
Welcome to Making Blank Accessible. Today we are making sure everyone is informed, equipped and included by making news accessible. Our guest is tackling the core mission of public media with an accessibility first approach. Joining me today is Stacy Kess, editor in chief of Equal Access Public Media. Stacy is a pioneer, ensuring that critical news and public information is designed from the start to reach everyone, regardless of their ability or platform. Stacy, welcome to the Accessibility Show.

Stacy Kess (00:38)
Thank you.

Britne Jenke (00:39)
Stacy, let’s jump in with a question about how you got started in the world of accessible journalism. What was that moment or experience that first made you realize accessibility really needed to be the core focus of your work?

A SuperHero Origin Story

Stacy Kess (00:55)
Well, I would say it was a car crash in 2017. That’s sort of my superhero origin story. I had been a journalist for years prior to… This is Bodie everyone. had been a journalist for years prior to this car crash. and I was hit head on in late August 2017. That left me with a severe traumatic brain injury, some other physical injuries, and I spent two years going through physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech therapy. One of the toughest things for me was aphasia. I had trouble word finding. I had trouble taking in information. I couldn’t read due to some eye injury, injury to the muscles in my eyes. And I had trouble concentrating from the brain injury. So it was a lot going on. And I spent a lot of time in recovery from that crash. When I sort of came out of recovery, I realized that during that time in recovery, I wasn’t able to access news the way I previously had. And I certainly couldn’t. write or edit the way I had. Now prior to the crash I had spent years hiding chronic illness from myself but also from my editors which meant that I worked through illness. I worked through a lot of strain on my body. I worked to the point where I ignored symptoms. When I finished recovering, or I should say as recovery brought me back to a new normal in 2019, my previous symptoms were much more pronounced. And I became pretty much a… much, I would say about what they call an ambulatory wheelchair user, where most of the time I used a wheelchair to get around, though I could stand up for short periods of time and I could transfer myself and walk short distances, but my heart had significant problems, my muscles had… were still strong, but my joints had very significant problems. So there were no answers, and we started pursuing answers with the help of my primary care physician at the time. I became a medical mystery because I had recovered from this crash in very significant ways that were very surprising to the medical team, but I couldn’t yet go back to work. And so I’m still unable to go back to the field I love. And so again, the field is inaccessible to me. And so during recovery, the news, which I’m a news junkie by, you know, by job, by just who I am, was inaccessible to me. And now after recovery, the field is inaccessible to me. And that brought us to right into the pandemic. In fact, prior to the pandemic, I was in the hospital just before the pandemic hit. I was hospitalized for two weeks while they were still working on this mystery illness. So I had the first two years of the pandemic. Well, most doctors were overwhelmed. I was seeing these specialists who were like, I don’t have any patients, what’s going on? Hey, want to come see So I’m seeing genetics and I’m seeing, you know, all these really rare specialists. But I became, you know, I actually got my diagnoses and so on and so forth. 2022 comes around and I’m ready to rejoin the field. And I start applying for managing editor jobs. And I’m told point blank to my face, you know, it’s not your disability that worries us, it’s the time you had off for your disability. And I said, wow, why don’t you just say it, you know, it’s, so that’s my villain origin story or my superhero origin story, however you want to put it. And I, and I thought I can remember exactly the moment because I was still in physical therapy at this point, because my joints had gotten so bad. that in my heart had so much, so many issues. was doing physical therapy, I was in water physical therapy and I can remember being in the pool and my physical therapist, Greg, was there and I’m telling him this idea I had. I’m like, okay, an organization and we support making the field of journalism more accessible and we make the news more accessible. And one of our projects is that we make a national newspaper or national news outlet that’s so accessible and it makes news accessible in more ways. And he’s like, are you going to do it? Yeah, I should do it. So yeah, I mean, literally the moment Equal Access Public Media was born was during physical therapy on a January morning in warm water physical therapy.

Britne Jenke (06:11)
That… no, it’s a great story. It’s a great origin story. And thank you for sharing your personal journey and how much the accessibility matters to you personally, because I’m sure other people listening

Stacy Kess (06:17)
That’s the long story.

Britne Jenke (06:35)
have similar experiences where they have been faced with news or information that is inaccessible in some way, and they are struggling to be informed or to get access. And your work, your ideas are making that possible for so many people. When you look at, let’s say just a typical breaking news story today, what is maybe the single most overlooked inaccessible barrier that people outside of journalism may not realize?

Stacy Kess (07:06)
Sorry about that. Well, I actually have statistics. I always bring data. Sorry, I’m a data journalist by nature. That’s how I started. I started as a healthcare journalist and then quickly moved into editing. So healthcare journalists also tend to have a data background.

Britne Jenke (07:07)
She brings data!

Accessibility Stats and Plain Language

Stacy Kess (07:30)
usually started in science or we have a science degree, which means we bring the data. when you look at a news site and most people are getting their news on the internet, in fact, slightly over 50 % of people get their news at least some of the time from social media. That is 2025 Pew research, which has remained steady over the last couple of years, but at least some of the time most people, most US adults are getting their news from social media. But when you go to a news website, there is an average of 58 accessibility errors on a news website page. 58 accessibility errors. Those errors tend to be… Missing alt text, color contrast problems and then my personal pet peeve is language. Okay, so we tend to not use plain language and I want to break down plain language for people. We tend to use, even when we think we’re using plain language, we’re not using plain language and so

Britne Jenke (08:24)
Yeah, please.

Stacy Kess (08:40)
What is plain language? This is really hard concept for people. Plain language is not something that you can put a number to, like the Flesch Kincaid. People are gonna tell you. It is not a score, even though the Flesch Kincaid people are probably gonna write me and sue me on this. Maybe, maybe not. Don’t, please don’t. Nobody at me or whatever the saying is. And there is an international group of plain language and they’re going to back me on this. Plain language is context. It is using language people broadly understand. Now here’s the thing. more than 50 % of Americans read at or below a sixth grade reading level. So when we’re using language people broadly understand, we shouldn’t be using those 25 cent words. And I love that saying. Those are the big dictionary definition, multi-syllabic words that are just there to show I’m smarter than you. Don’t use. most people are going to get lost. I sit here with a dictionary and a thesaurus and actually I have two medical dictionaries, two dictionaries, one of which is from 1956 because it’s been handed down to me, three different style guides, so on and so forth. Two drug dictionaries and again, nursing, know, old health editor here next to me on my bookshelf. But that’s not everyone. Not everyone is sitting there with Merriam-Webster open, though I love Merriam-Webster and I love their social media, they are hilarious. But not everyone is sitting with Merriam-Webster open. So you shouldn’t write using words that someone has to look up. And if you do use a word that needs to be defined, you have to define it. The same thing is when you put out political information that isn’t something that everyone uses, you know? Broadly understood terms. You shouldn’t assume that your followers, your readership, your watchers, your viewers, your listeners are following an issue so closely that they know all the information you have to give them a little context and background, right? That’s plain language. Plain language is context. It’s using broadly understood terms. It’s really connecting language-wise with your readers, your viewers, your listeners, the people that your audience is. But we have our SEO programs and our You know, all our websites now come with all these, know, and even our Google Doc and our Word and our whatever all come with the thing that tells us our reading score. You know, now they’re all built in. And if you use one of those language checkers, it gives you a reading score, right? Those are all Flesch Kincaid and all of those things. And they’re not, they’re giving you a formula. That’s a formulaic thing and it takes out the nuance. Okay, it takes out the nuance of What is plain language? So what I get when I teach people about plain language is pushback. Plain language is quote unquote, dumbing it down. Plain language isn’t dumbing it down, it’s connecting with your community, your audience. So that’s…

Britne Jenke (11:55)
Hmm.

Stacy Kess (12:17)
So I get two extremes. get either people thinking it’s easy English, which is a whole different thing, and shout out to Easy English Australia. Hello, my friends. Or I get people who want to be the Atlantic and no shade to the Atlantic. You’re the New Yorker. You guys are not meant for your average reader. You guys are in your own category of like, highfaluting, you know, PhD readers. So, you know, we’re not, we’re talking about average news, breaking news. You can’t be using, you know, those words. And again, the other thing is your color contrast, your alt text, and I love to say alt text is the gateway drug to accessibility. And I’d like to get everybody hooked.

Britne Jenke (13:05)
Love that, love that. So obviously accessible news is so much more than just putting captions or transcripts along with what we’re producing. It is how those words come across in plain language. It’s so important to be able to make those topics like, like you said, health information.

Stacy Kess (13:14)
Yes.

Britne Jenke (13:28)
political information, making those topics accessible to the public is so very important. So maybe for those listening, walk us through the method a little bit. When you are creating a brand new story, what is the first step that you’re taking to make sure that this story is born accessible? What principles or what guidelines do you follow?

Interviewing with Accessibility in Mind

Stacy Kess (13:34)
Absolutely. Well, we aren’t necessarily a news outlet. We have created one news outlet, and our big project is to create a big news outlet, national news outlet. But we do training for journalists. We offer paid training to newsrooms and news organizations. We have a style guide out there. And what we like to say is, you know, accessibility starts with interviewing. So, you know, who are you interviewing? Are you offering interviews that are accessible? And we get pushback again from journalists and editors because, you know, when you’re offering accessible interviews, you need to sometimes make accommodations for your source. If your source is neurodivergent, may need to offer sort of a range of questions or like what you might be asking in the interview ahead of time. editors don’t love that you might be sort of giving even a loose idea of what you’re asking ahead of time. I’m an editor. I’ve been an editor for 25 years. You know what? Like, let that go. let that go. Like you want to, you know, be accommodating. If your source is deaf or hard of hearing, is the, you know, if you can’t have a translator available or an interpreter available or, you know, might that interview be easy, best done? over email or some other written source, you know, because, you know, are you, you know, are you putting the onus on them to do something like lip reading, which is not okay. We don’t, you know, we, need to be more accommodating and that’s, that’s getting a range of, you know, different sources. We know that there are experts out there.

Britne Jenke (15:33)
Sure.

Stacy Kess (15:45)
who have a range of expertise who also happen to be disabled. But we don’t hear from them. ⁓ We also don’t, we need to be aware that when we’re interviewing people with disabilities, we need to be speaking to them, not their caregivers, their assistants, so on and so forth. So a lot of times when you hear, or when you see articles about disability issues or accessibility issues, mostly disability issues, you see interviews with non-disabled people about the disability issue. One of the greatest examples was when two months ago, just before the government shut down, the two, three months ago, two months ago, time is a little wibbly wobbly. the government cut funding for DeafBlind programs in Oregon, Wisconsin, going to leave off a state here, I’m so sorry, the New England Consortium, and one other state, and I am so sorry to that other state that I’m leaving off.

Britne Jenke (16:51)
We’ll grab an article and we’ll…

Stacy Kess (16:52)
Anyway, articles by ProPublica, by Education Week, they interviewed parents. They interviewed non-deafblind educators. They interviewed state ⁓ superintendents. Who didn’t they interview? Deafblind activists, deafblind children, deafblind students, nobody. I had… So we run a magazine called The Word. It’s about issues in journalism, a style in media, and accessibility in media. I had one of our reporters go out and talk to deafblind activists because that was something I noticed, that media left out deafblind activists from the story, deafblind students. And so we talked to them. And we said, what does it mean when deafblind people are left out of the story? You know, people who are deafblind need to have a voice in the story. And that’s the thing is they had a voice, they raised their voices, proverbially and sometimes actually in, getting the, Helen Keller,

Britne Jenke (17:47)
Absolutely.

Stacy Kess (17:56)
Institute which funds the National Deafblind Group to then offer grants where the federal government had pulled the funding. But no one talked to actual deaf people who are deafblind to get their perspective. Those voices are, they’re professionals, they are lawyers, they are teachers, they are parents. So why aren’t we talking to them? And so this is an issue that I had our reporter cover, that they weren’t covered, that they weren’t sources, that they weren’t talked to.

Britne Jenke (18:28)
Absolutely. Sure.

More on Accessible News

Stacy Kess (18:32)
So accessibility in news actually starts right from the source, from the sources we use. Then it goes to how we’re doing our stories. Are we, you know, in articles, are we using the right words, as I said, language? When we lay it out on the page, are we… you know, using the best way to link. Are we our HTML correctly? Are we following, you know, rules of ARIA? Are our photos, do they have alt text? Do they have image descriptions? And we like to suggest that your image description be combined with your cut line. Do your videos have you know, transcript and the closed captioning, if possible, you know, American Sign Language, or if you’re not in America, British Sign Language, or you know, so on and so forth, do they have, you know, video descriptions, which I know that… you know, to get all of this in, you might need to find a better video player. We’re working on building one. We’re not happy with, you know, the options out there. So we’re working on building a new video player that can allow us to do all the things. We just haven’t found one yet. So we’re working on building a new video player. So, you know, the… This is, know, when you have audio, when your interviews or your news is by audio, do you have a transcript available of the audio? Do you maybe have a quick fact that people can, you know, just pull instead of like needing to read through the whole audio? Is your audio player allow for slowing it down, speeding it up. And you know, the biggest thing that I need to see from people is, your website able to be run through by a screen reader? I use a screen reader regularly to check through websites. I use it, I mean, I use a screen reader regularly. So I understand how it sounds, how it works, how it feels. But I think most people just do their accessibility checks using an accessibility checker. It is actually different. Those accessibility checkers do not necessarily capture or feel, and at some time is different than what the screen reader actually said.

Britne Jenke (20:52)
Sure.

Stacy Kess (20:53)
So all of this matters. And there just aren’t enough of us in journalism who actually know accessibility, who actually do accessibility. There’s sort of a joke that all of us could fit in my apartment in Boston, specifically my living room, for dinner. So we need more of us.

Britne Jenke (21:12)
Yeah, let’s fill Stacy’s full apartment and not just the living room.

Stacy Kess (21:16)
Yeah, exactly. Let’s have so many of us that, you know, let’s make all of journalism accessible. I would love to quit and close down tomorrow and then just go, like, have a regular job editing where I could just sit in my office all day and, like, be, like, worried about commas, you know? And that would be great. Like, if I could do nothing but tomorrow be, like, the most pedantic editor, and worry about commas and what’s going on in the news and make news choices all day and go back to being the best managing editor in the world. I would love it. Help me close down. But until then we need donations and we need to keep going. So yeah.

Britne Jenke (21:55)
Everyone should be making it. Yeah, of course. Yes. No, that would be the dream if all the news were just accessible and we didn’t need an organization to specifically work on this. But since we do need the organization to work on this, we have Equal Access Public Media. as Stacy said, always taking donations towards nonprofit work.

Stacy Kess (22:07)
Yeah. Yes. Exactly.

The Impact of Accessible News

Britne Jenke (22:21)
So let’s talk about maybe the impact of accessibility in the news. How is it that we measure success when it comes to making news accessible? So what may be tangible benefits, outcomes, increased comprehension rates from that? Those plain English articles, is that something that we can measure? How is this making journalism better?

Stacy Kess (22:48)
You know, we’d love to see more journalists in the newsroom who identify as disabled. We don’t have a specific measure or we don’t track, I should say, in the US, journalists who… We don’t have an organization that does that. If we had the funding… for Equal Access Public Media, I think that is something that we would love to do, is track that. How many journalists identify as disabled? How many journalists identify as neurodivergent? How many journalists identify as so on? Military veterans in journalism estimate that about 2 % of journalists are veterans. We did some math using Department of Labor, their data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we were able to, being data wonks, come up with that about 7 % of journalists are likely disabled and then using further data, extrapolate that most of those who openly, you who are disabled are likely either unemployed or are unemployed, likely also, you know, maybe freelance. And that was a lot of math, a lot of statistical analysis, so on and so forth. They track in, there’s an organization that tracks in the UK. how many disabled journalists, and they’ve come up with about 15 % in the UK. But we don’t have that here. So we had to sort of extrapolate from some, you know, government data, and that was last year using Bureau of Labor Statistics. The data was about like a year, two years old. So we just don’t know. The thing is that we also would like to see more journalists who are aware of accessibility, using accessibility. We would love to see that number. The number I gave earlier about the accessibility errors, that’s from Web AIM. News websites ranks among the worst. And it’s been consistent. Like it improved from last year. They do the… the Web 1 million every year, journalism is out, like news sites are always at the bottom. We need to start being at the top. But there’s not enough of us working journalists or people working in journalism who are also accessibility people. People who are often leave because journalism says, we don’t have the funding. We don’t do the, you. But so much of it is free. You don’t have to pay anything to do alt text. We have a budget of, use duct tape and chewed up chewing gum and pieces of lint at Equal Access Public Media. I have built our websites with the accessibility in mind from the start. That’s not to say things don’t go wrong, know, links don’t break. You know, web gremlins exist. I am 100 % sure of it. Don’t feed them after midnight. But you you start from the beginning and you take accessibility courses or you, you know, they’re all over the place or you read accessibility information, you join accessibility groups and you constantly learn and you just work. from the beginning, don’t use overlays, just start from the beginning and then you come to my courses. I am constantly doing free trainings, I am at conferences, talking about how to do accessibility, talking about how to work it in, doing accessibility basics trainings, trying to inspire people to make their websites just a little bit more. So if we could reduce that number, of errors on the web AIM, web one million, and stop being at the bottom in journalism on the news sites and stop being an embarrassment. If we could have more web accessibility people or just journalists advocating like, hey, I did the alt text, throw it in there. I recently had to teach a college newspaper photography editor, the photo editor at a college newspaper, how to do alt text of his photos. Just didn’t even know, their newspaper just doesn’t do it. We need to make this second hand. It just should be second nature. If we just feel like everyone… in journalism should be learning it, should be doing it, and that would be a measure of, you know… Success. More disabled people in the newsroom, more veterans, more caregivers, because caregivers always get left out even though they have high rates of back injury, depression, anxiety. Maybe they don’t call themselves disabled or chronically ill, but they show all the same. People call themselves different things. They’re disabled. And so if we put those people at the table, We’re going to see different results. We’re going to see more accessibility in journalism.

Call to Action

Britne Jenke (27:59)
Absolutely. Absolutely. And like you said, those voices need to be at the table. We need to be hearing from all of those voices. I think you’ve maybe already kind of answered my last question here. But think of maybe a journalist or an editor that’s listening to this episode and you’ve just told them all the things they can do to make their website more accessible with alt text and ARIA and HTML. And maybe what’s the one thing to start with? Is it the alt text? Is it the ARIA and HTML? Where’s the first place that we start today? Start with the alt text. All right. Alt text and then call Stacy. All right.

Stacy Kess (28:36)
Start with the alt text. Start with the alt text. And then call me.

Britne Jenke (28:43)
I love that. that’s that is our call to action for this episode is if you are listening and you are interested in making the news more accessible, start with alt text and then call Stacy for help.

Stacy Kess (28:55)
Start with the gateway drug to accessibility alt text. I will get you hooked and then we’ll go from there.

Britne Jenke (28:58)
Alright, Stacy, before we wrap this up, where can our listeners find Equal Access Public Media and support all of the work that you’re doing?

Stacy Kess (29:10)
go to equalaccesspublicmedia.org.

Britne Jenke (29:13)
All right, we’ll have that link for you. Yes, that simple. We’ll have that link for you ⁓ in the episode description as well. A huge heartfelt thank you to Stacy for being our guest today, helping us make news more accessible. Your insights into the power of accessibility in journalism are truly invaluable. And thank you so much for the work that you are doing in this space. All right.

Stacy Kess (29:13)
That simple. Thank you, Britne. It’s been fun.

Britne Jenke (29:41)
Thank you!