Having an accessible recruitment process is not only the law, it’s one of the most effective ways to deepen your talent pool of potential recruits.

Jack Tyrrell works as a solutions profiler at Sydney-based charity, Media Access Australia, and is legally blind. In previous job applications, Tyrrell’s been excluded by inaccessible forms and recruitment processes that have closed the door on potential job opportunities.

“A while back, I failed a second-stage interview because I couldn’t fill out that little message you get asking you to distinguish yourself from a robot because I couldn’t see the numbers,” says Tyrrell.

“Another time, there was a video interview I had to do, and that caused a lot of problems, which were later solved by a conference call, but I could tell the person on the other end of the phone was not happy.”

“Later, when I did have a job, I had to fill out timesheets online. But it was inaccessible – my screen reader was reading out one thing, yet the form was saying another – so I had to get my brother to come over to physically fill in my hours for me,” explains Tyrrell. “Not only was that quite inconvenient, but worse, I was distraught. Here I was with a job, but I couldn’t do basic stuff like filling in a timesheet by myself. That really hurt.”

Ensuring you have a diverse and engaged workforce pays dividends for both the organisation and the people who work there, through job satisfaction, productivity, and cultural flow-throughs. Yet when a person who could have been an ideal addition to the team is prevented from applying through these kind of roadblocks, everyone loses out.

Inaccessible position descriptions, online application forms, timesheets, and mandatary agreement documents such as a Social Media Policy, can all prevent applicants with a disability from even applying for jobs.

Not only does that open the door to potential litigation via the provisions in the Disability Discrimination Act 1992, which prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in employment, education, provision of goods and services, clubs and associations, and other contexts, but it prohibits talented individuals from being considered for a position.

(Read our article on why organisations need to be more than “positive” when it comes to disability recruitment.)

Here are six tips for improving accessible recruitment in digital environments

Create goals: Ensure the organisation’s Access & Inclusion planning documents incorporate goals for checking and making digital environments accessible and compliant.

Test the user experience: If you already have people experiencing disability in the workplace (vision, hearing, cognitive) it may be feasible to enlist their help to check or test the process. A more thorough usability test will uncover issues across all forms of disability.

Promote document accessibility: If you create position descriptions to be accessible, why not put in a statement at the end of the document acknowledging that it has been created using accessibility principles and encouraging contact if any further assistance is required.

Make alternate formats: If content in one format is not accessible, create multiple formats. For example, if a ‘PD’ is not accessible in PDF, create a version in Word or HTML, as they are easier to make accessible.

Accessible videos improve everyone’s experience: Adding captions and a transcript to recruitment videos improves accessibility and Search Engine Optimisation too.

Avoid images of text: If text is presented as an image, it means that users of screen readers cannot access and read the words that are superimposed on to that image, unless Alternative Text is included within image formatting that accurately explains the image in words.

Not-for-Profit digital access advocates, Media Access Australia, have put together a guide on digital accessibility in recruitment to provide practical ‘real world’ guidance on how to address accessibility-related issues in human resources management. It’s free to download here.

Philip Jenkinson has previously written for Mortgage & Finance Brief and Insurance & Risk Professional magazine amongst other publications.