Writing for accessibility is important at TELUS. This ensures all customers, team members and audiences, regardless of ability or environment, can easily use a product or service. Accessibility is a legal requirement, mandated by the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) and the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).

Designers provide a visual framework to ensure that all of our customers and team members, regardless of their abilities, can enjoy great digital experiences. It’s important for designers to be aware of our accessibility standards to design across any device or screen size.

Developers combine the content and visual design to build the experience for our customers. In the following sections read more about accessible coding and how you can create digital products that everyone can use.

Alternative (alt) text is an integral part of any web page that requires the same careful considerations as the content and design strategy. This information is a guide to help define when, how and where to use alt text from the perspectives of Content Writers and Strategists along with Content managers and QA.

Many of our Guides mention colour contrast. While the requirements are straight forward at first, as you layer on more interactivity, the requirements become overwhelming.

TELUS’ core principle is customer first. This means delivering an accessible digital experience regardless of a customer’s abilities, device quality or screen size. Our guidelines are in place to ensure that we not only meet legal requirements but also to allow our digital experiences to be seamlessly viewed through assistive technology.

Windows high contrast mode and Firefox high contrast mode (on Mac OSX and Windows) allow the user to customize stylesheets at either the OS level or the browser level.

It strips out the visual design, and leave the semantic code in a more raw state, where default HTML states are more easily seen and background images are removed entirely from the screen to reduce clutter.

The keyboard alone/alternative standard allows our customers to decide how they want to use our website and mobile app.

Customers who may have motor skill differences like broken arms, arthritis, tremors, or difficulty in using any minor motor skills due to physical disabilities will benefit from these standard practices.

Customers who use technologies like screen magnification software also benefit from using keyboards accessibility, in conjunction with a mouse to navigate the desktop experience.

It is also common for people to use a keyboard to navigate quicker than mouse users.

Animations, gifs, parallax, and many other types of movement can make our customers feel sick when they engage with our more modern interfaces.

These guides help to break down what to do.

Anything that is on a server and available for consumption like video, audio, email, slide decks, document files, PDFs are required to meet our digital standards.

At TELUS we’re committed to putting our customer’s needs first regardless of their abilities, devices or screen size. We want all our customers to enjoy a great digital experience, so accessibility is at the heart of every experience.

Screen readers use the semantic code matched with the accessibility tree and API to understand and navigate the content. 

By following these Guides you will be able to support our customers with screen readers, and also other assistive technologies that use the same APIs and trees to communicate with your application.  Example: Speech recognition software, Text-to-speech, and many more.

Text resize and text zoom are built into the operating systems on our desktops and mobile devices, as well as in our browsers. Our interfaces need to accommodate the reflow that will occur without impeding the readability or function of the content.

When we increase the size of the content we also need many of our guidelines to be retested since often we adapt the design when we reach certain endpoints.

These guides will help you make sure your content works for customers who increase their font or text size.