Simon Fairbanks, Senior content strategist at Pickle Jar Communications will be speaking at HigherEdWeb this year.

Session description:

Maps are important.

We wouldn’t embark on a long and challenging journey without one. The journey towards better accessibility is no exception.

Only, rather than a geographical map, we need an empathy map. Having greater empathy with our audiences will help us identify barriers that are making our content inaccessible.

These barriers could be related to formatting (no alt text), presentation (lack of diversity in videos) or language (overuse of alienating university jargon).

A better understanding of our audiences through empathy-mapping – their needs, experiences, behaviours, emotions, motivations, influences – will offer us valuable opportunities to remove these barriers.

Firstly, this session will offer you a series of empathy-mapping models that have been used by content strategists to better understand audiences in higher education.

Secondly, you will learn methods to populate these empathy maps to ensure you are not filling them with guesswork and assumptions.

Finally, you will understand how your empathy-mapping can be translated into meaningful insights to increase the usability, inclusivity, and sensitivity of your content.

Together, we can put accessibility on the map.