Giant sleeps are for everyone

Disability and accessibility is an important part of the Small Steps story. Our family knows how important quality sleep is to life with a disability.

The short-version of our accessibility goals are that disability should never be a barrier to kiddos and families accessing and applying quality sleep education.

Practically, that means:

• Being prepared to modify sleep techniques and tips to accommodate parent and child disabilities (this may include coordinating with medical supervision)
• Offering accessibility features and accommodations during virtual meetings, phone calls, and in written communication
• Providing accessible documents in line with Section 508 accessible document practices
• Ensuring web content meets WCAG 2.2 AA standards (and someday, AAA!).

How I do accessibility

Disclaimer: I’m not an accessibility expert. But, I am to do my best by:

• Researching the ways disability impacts sleep and parenting techniques, and the assistive technologies and adaptive strategies disabled people use
• Choosing platforms, tools, templates, and plugins with features to help make the Small Steps content accessible, when they’re affordable
• Following best practices to the best of my ability (like the WordPress Content Best Practices)
• Gathering and prioritizing feedback from disabled people whenever there is an opportunity
• Sourcing disability and accessibility expertise whenever there is an opportunity and / or budget

Known limitations

Small Steps is always working to be more accessible — for example, I just migrated my entire site to WordPress to take advantage of features that will make it easier for me to make accessible content.

But there’s still work to be done. Here are some known limitations:

• The website may need new fonts. There is a ton of misinformation and contradictory information about reading disabilities and accessible fonts, so researching this and identifying the best fonts is a future roadmap item. Additionally, the current fonts don’t render on Firefox, and the fallback fonts present legibility challenges.
• The Teachable.com platform used for the Small Steps Giant Sleeps courses is known to have accessibility issues and is only partially conformant to WCAG 2.1 AA. Multiple accessibility experts have told me that there aren’t strong alternatives to Teachable. I have submitted a formal request for them to prioritize reaching their own goals.
• Video content lacks audio descriptions.

If you identify any other accessibility issues, please email josh@moxiea11y.com (my accessibility consultant).