What will 2025 bring for accessibility in journalism?

Is 2025  the year for accessibility to be taken seriously in newsrooms?

Are pennies really beginning to drop?

It’s that time of year when we all try to read the runes and gaze into the future to try to second guess what might be coming up in journalism over the next 12 months. As various factors continue to cause mass lay offs in the journalism industry and the lines between journalism and content creators continue to blur, how   can newsrooms best position themselves to best serve all audiences?

Unsurprisingly for me it’s all about accessibility. Newsrooms proactively engaging with audiences accessing content in different ways will continue to demonstrate respect and awareness which inevitably locks in loyalty, thus building a solid foundation for the future.  

In his Nieman Lab prediction for 2025, Associate Director of Operations at the Centre for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University Joe Amditis  predicts that this year will be the year when we stop excusing the lack of accessibility in news. 

“Accessibility is the future of journalism.” Joe writes. “ Newsrooms that embrace these practices now are setting themselves and their staff up to not only meet the needs of their current audiences but are also positioning themselves as leaders in ethical, inclusive media for years to come. “

For Joe’s prediction to come anywhere close to reality there needs to be a huge shift left approach to everything we do in our newsrooms. For accessibility to become truly baked into what we do we need to take a systems wide approach and understand how decisions taken in one area can have a negative impact somewhere else. If we ask “who will this decision exclude and how can we mitigate against that exclusion” across the newsroom ecosystem we can begin to really make progress. Think about any decision being taken in a newsroom and ask who you might be leaving out by taking your initial approach and you’ll begin to see  why problems arise.

Shifting left at the early concept stage of any process is going to have a massive proactive beneficial impact on a newsrooms awareness of accessibility. The desire to create a fantastic digital  visual experience is great in theory, but how can you ensure people who can’t see the content have an equally fantastic experience? If you continue with your initial approach are you happy in the knowledge that you’re excluding a big part of your audience?

The most proactive and progressive newsrooms will understand the value of having accessibility awareness embedded into every part of the newsroom ecosystem and have a visible leader who can tie everything together. Someone who can view all processes through an accessibility lens and mitigate against all possible problems before they become insurmountable. HR, coms, procurement, recruitment, user experience, technology, editorial and all other elements should be understood from an accessibility perspective and planned for  accordingly. The modern newsroom  has so many different moving parts it’s integral for inclusion that they’re not viewed independently from each other.

The Gen AI juggernaut  keeps on going

2024 has seen generative AI ushered in as a possible great saviour for news, but has it really lived up to the hype? The breath taking acceleration of releases and updates from new and established players has meant it’s often difficult to keep up with developments. One area however where the hype might just live up to the reality is for accessibility. In his prediction for 2025, Head of Product at Indian news service News Laundry Chitranshu Tewari Believes that using AI to make news more accessible is going to become more mainstream.  I spoke to Chitranshu for Journalism A11y way back in August where he told me accessibility isn't rocket science, but what you need is the intent.  

Chitranshu  believes that innovative use of generative AI has the capacity to unlock new revenue streams as audiences previously excluded from news  find content more accessible than ever.

“Imagine an AI chatbot trained on the brilliant alt-text resources created by the BBC in a newsroom where desk editors are too swamped to write and add alt text for all images and infographics.”  He says.

Thanks to Chitranshu for the reference to those guidelines we created earlier this year. It’s great to see the impact they’re having. I do think gen AI has a potential role to play in creating meaningful text descriptions for all images in news.  I’m still of the mindset however that all journalists still need to have the final say over anything created by the technology. It’s certainly possible to have a chat bot trained on those guidelines, and it’s something we’ve played with at the BBC, but it’s too tempting to rely solely on AI and not scrutinise the output. Text descriptions are nuanced and subtle when done right. I’m fascinated though in other areas for gen AI and accessibility. The possibility for example multimodal functionality can bring. Being able to translate complicated visual data charts   or infographics into equally creative sonifications   or using AI to  seamlessly   add impactful audio description to a VT could be a massive leap forward for accessibility. Again though human oversight is still crucial.  There’s likely to be other ethical concerns as well. The possibility to provide BSL or other international sign languages to content could be seen to be taking jobs away from people whose job it already is to provide that translation.  I am excited though about the yet undiscovered or not thought about possibilities we might see this year. The potential is “still” huge.

The value of lived experience

One of the best ways to  innovate around accessibility is to employ more people with lived experience of accessing content in different ways.  The BBC’s recent Rethink Disability Festival focused a lot on the need for more disabled journalists across all our newsrooms, but with this comes an equally important understanding of what barriers currently exist which preclude disabled people from doing their best work.    

Podcast producer at The Sick Times James Salanga  echoes a lot of what was discussed at the Rethink Disability Festival in their 2025 Nieman Lab prediction where they say  there needs to be more investment in the disability beat. And that ablism needs to be called out for what it is. James also says there needs to be more understanding of the intersectionality of disability and that the fact the majority of disabled people working as journalists are white also needs to be opened up for discussion.

If newsrooms want to cover that seriously, they must begin analysing ableism seriously — across journalism’s culture, history, and frames.” James says. “That also means investing in the disability beat in 2025 and beyond, particularly by creating institutional support for disabled writers: “Nothing about us, without us” is true of news making too.”  They conclude.

A great point from James to end on. I definitely feel that 2024 has seen a seismic shift in how accessibility and inclusion  are being talked about and considered in newsrooms. Senior leaders are finally waking up to the fact it’s all about audiences and that by proactively reaching out and creating content for everyone the benefits are real and tangible. There’s still a long way to go before newsrooms are truly equitable places and the content we create is fit for all audiences. We’re certainly getting there. Progress  over perfection. We can hopefully look back this time next year and see how far we've come. I'm forever hopeful.

Thanks as always for reading and talk soon. Have a lovely holiday if you’re taking one and catch up in 2025.

Johny

PS The European Accessibility Act is also going to play big in 2025. More about that though next year. 😊