Shownotes
Marketing an online course for psychologists part 6: Creating inclusive online marketing and education resources. Guidance for psychologists and therapists
Psychologists and therapists usually care a great deal about inclusivity and we spend time in training and service planning thinking about how we can make sure our work is accessible to those who need it. However, in my experience we often don’t put as much thought into our marketing and teaching. Many mental health accounts on social media fail to fully represent the people following that account and most haven’t yet learned how to make their content accessible to those with visual or hearing impairments. Similarly, online courses are often totally inaccessible to people with learning difficulties like dyslexia or colour blindness. This is completely unnecessarily exclusionary as there is awesome guidance available all over the web to let us know how we can make our content accessible. Since much of our marketing and teaching is now being done online it is well worth spending some time thinking about how we can make sure anything we put out there that is intended to provide psychoeducation is inclusive and accessible to all that could benefit from it. In this episode I am going to outline some basic principles and link to the best resources I have found to support you in making your marketing and educational materials as inclusive as possible.
It was actually while researching for my new online course for our membership “The roadmap to a successful online course” that I came across the resources I am going to link to today. I am always looking to try and make sure that the materials I create are as inclusive and accessible as possible and I wanted to make sure that we had a module dedicated to that in the course. So if you are planning to add an online course into your psychology or therapy practice then do come and check out the roadmap. It sits at the centre of our monthly membership and will take you from your very first idea for a course right the way through to getting it in front of all the people who need it.
Create inclusive marketing and educational resources that your audience can relate to
Images that reflect the range of people you are serving and stories that allow people to see themselves in what you are teaching. I’ve talked in previous episodes about the idea of having a representative group of ideal clients in mind when you are creating your marketing and educational resources. If you haven’t listened to the Ideal Client Avatar episode then it is worth going back to that one. I try to have different members of this group in mind as I create my resources and try to make sure that there are images and stories that help each of those people to see themselves in what I am teaching or talking about. If you are training professionals this could include sharing relevant stories from the different groups you have in the room (for example mental health nurses, psychotherapists and psychologists) as well as the characteristics you would usually think about when talking about inclusivity like race, gender identity and socio economic background. In this episode I talk about a test that I use before I include stories in my resources and that includes an inclusivity check.
I like this blog from Sprout social that gives some ideas for making sure your content is anti racist in a helpful way.
Amnesty have also produced a simple guide to creating resources that are respectful of all gender identities that I think is useful. One tip I have picked up that is specific to online teaching is that zoom will now allow you to specify your pronouns below your name when you join a call. I think that is a good way of making it safe for your attendees to do the same if they wish to without putting any pressure on them to do so if they don’t feel safe. https://www.amnesty.org.uk/LGBTQ-equality/gender-identity-beginners-guide-trans-allies
Create inclusive resources for the hard of hearing: Subtitles
Subtitles on all videos are very important for people with impaired hearing (or interpretation if possible). There are tools that will do this for free. For example you can upload a video to Youtube and it will automatically generate captions. However, this is something that I think is worth spending some money to make sure you get it right in the shortest amount of time possible as it can be very time consuming and faffy with the free tools. For my lessons for my online courses I personally get captions generated by Rev.com which costs about £1 a minute (so around £90 for my lessons). I then review them to make sure there are no glaring errors (or I ask my editor to do that as I am not good at that kind of thing) and they automatically appear on my vimeo videos. IF you are posting to another platform you can use a free tool like Kapwing to burn your Rev captions on to your video or you can upload them separately to Facebook. For social media videos I do use the auto generated captions that Facebook produces sometimes as you can edit these, but it is still quite glitchy and if I want to use a video for an ad or I hope lots of people will see it then I tend to use Zubtitle to add my captions as it is easier to edit in there and you can also resize the video and make sure the captions appear in the right place for the platform you are using.
Create inclusive resources for the hard of hearing: Transcripts
Transcripts of audio and video content are also easy to generate using tools like Rev.com or otter.ai. Both of those are tools that you have to pay for but the thought of using a free tool and having to edit virtually every word myself makes it seem like an impossible and awful task. I don’t think I would create much content if I knew I had to do that every time (I used to do it so I know how aversive it was!) I think it is much better to pay and get a better quality output in minutes.
Create inclusive resources for the visually impaired: Alt Text
General principles for adding alt text and/or descriptions of images for visually impaired people.
Alt text is read by screen readers which help visually impaired people by speaking out loud the content of websites (including social media platforms). This blog from Harvard University gives some more in depth guidance about how to add alt text, including the best way to describe complex images such as graphs and charts, but essentially the best principle is to think about what someone who can’t see it needs to know about the image. That means putting it in context. For example, I have in the past been guilty of adding alt text to an image that just describes it basically such as “Facebook icon”. However, if the context is that people are meant to click that icon to go to my Facebook community I should put that in the alt text. https://accessibility.huit.harvard.edu/describe-content-images You can now add alt text to social media images too. I only found out about this recently and it is important that we start doing this so I’m glad to see that the platforms have started to make it easier for creators to do this. When you add a photo or image on Facebook you can go to the “edit” feature and save your alt text there. This blog and video from access now makes it really simple. https://accessnow.com/blog/how-to-add-alt-text-to-facebook-photos/ The alt text feature is in “advanced settings” after you have edited your photo on instagram, access now have a handy guide to adding it there too https://accessnow.com/blog/how-to-add-alt-text-to-instagram-photos/ You can also add descriptions to your images when using Twitter by simply clicking add description when you upload them https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/picture-descriptions Linked IN also make it really easy as when you click to edit your image at the top right of the image there is an option to add a description there. https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/109799/adding-alternative-text-to-images-for-accessibility?lang=en
Create inclusive resources: Being mindful of dyslexia.
The British Dyslexia Association have created a style guide to help us with this. It is very detailed but easy to follow so I won’t list it all out here but some key points I hadn’t considered before were: use sans serif fonts (like Ariel and Comic Sans rather than Times New Roman), use line spacing of 1.5 and text size of at least 12, no headings all in capital letters, left align rather than justify text, use short blocks of text with subheadings where possible and black text on white backgrounds should be avoided.
Create inclusive resources: Being mindful of colour blindness
I have to say I did not know much about colour blindness before I started researching for the complete roadmap to a successful online course. We are color blind have produced a useful summary of available resources here. The two basic principles I try to keep in mind are to avoid green and red and make sure there is sufficient contrast between colours. They also mention some helpful tools that allow you to check your design for contrast that seem really useful. I haven’t tried them yet so please, if you do, let me know which ones you like best and I will update this post with some recommendations.
Create inclusive resources: Respond to feedback
Ask for feedback and respond to what people tell you with an open mind rather than being defensive. If someone tells you that something you created wasn’t inclusive, don’t defend it, don’t talk about your intentions just agree to investigate it, get some opinions from people you respect (supervisors, colleagues, experts through lived experience) and change it if needed. Be kind to yourself, not every piece of content you create will be a hundred percent inclusive because no one is perfect. Sometimes you will need to create different forms of content to reach different people. Our episode on creating engaging online courses covered why that is a good idea anyway as people like learning in different formats. As long as you apply effort to learning to be more inclusive and you do your best to follow these principles in everything you produce you will have a good base to grow from as you develop your courses and marketing efforts.
**********
Links
Complete Roadmap to a Successful Online Course https://psychologybusinessschool.com/complete-roadmap-to-a-successful-online-course/
Episode 19: How Psychologists And Therapists Can Use An Ideal Client Avatar To Co Create And Market Their Services https://psychologybusinessschool.com/the-business-of-psychology/ideal-client-avatar-psychologists-therapists-marketing
How much should I say about myself online? A guide for psychologists and therapists on using self disclosure to reach and educate people https://psychologybusinessschool.com/the-business-of-psychology/self-disclosure-online-for-psychologists-and-therapists
Resources
5 Ways to Advance Diversity, Equity & Inclusion on Social https://sproutsocial.com/insights/brand-diversity-in-social-media/
Gender identity for beginners: a guide to being a great trans ally - Amnesty International UK https://www.amnesty.org.uk/LGBTQ-equality/gender-identity-beginners-guide-trans-allies
Write good Alt Text to describe images - Digital Accessibility https://accessibility.huit.harvard.edu/describe-content-images
How to Add Alt Text to Facebook Photos - AccessNow https://accessnow.com/blog/how-to-add-alt-text-to-facebook-photos/
How to Add Alt Text to Instagram Photos - AccessNow
https://accessnow.com/blog/how-to-add-alt-text-to-instagram-photos/
How to make images accessible for people - Twitter https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/picture-descriptions
Adding Alternative Text to Images for Accessibility - LinkedIn Help https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/109799/adding-alternative-text-to-images-for-accessibility?lang=en
Creating a dyslexia friendly workplace - Dyslexia friendly style guide
Resources for Designing for the Colorblind https://wearecolorblind.com/resources/collection/resources-for-designing-for-the-colorblind/
Tools
Rev.com https://www.rev.com/
Zubtitle https://zubtitle.com/
Otter https://otter.ai/
Mentioned in this episode:
Course Creation Guide
Do you dream of creating an online course? Are you desperate to reach more people but sceptical that you can ACTUALLY make it work? The truth is a lot of online courses do fail but that isn't because the content is bad. It is because the marketing strategy sucks. The truth is your marketing isn't a separate thing. Talking to the community you want to serve should be part of the development of the course. Getting to know them, giving them free resources and building relationships WHILE you build your course in the background is the key to success that most psychologists and therapists launching courses miss. Well not you! Because you can download my free course creation guide and get yourself on the right track to creating a course people actually want and need. The guide talks you through the first, essential steps you must take when planning your course so you can avoid the expensive mistakes I see so many well-intentioned people making. Get yours at PsychologyBusinessSchool.com now - the link is in the show notes.
