Expanding publishing capacity with accessible video tools

Challenge

A growing schedule constrained by one producer

The Ford Foundation uses its website to communicate its work on inequality through stories, programme information and multimedia content. Its communications team publishes routine updates alongside richer web projects that combine narrative, data and video. Both formats need to be accessible to the foundation’s audiences. That includes blind and visually impaired people, and deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers who need alternatives to a video’s visual or audio track.

Publishing had grown from two or three pieces a month to three or four each week, but the workflow still depended on a single producer. Staff needed around three weeks of training before they could publish independently. The team sometimes brought in freelancers already familiar with the old system, an approach that did not solve the underlying bottleneck. Years of accumulated complexity also made the system cumbersome, so limited production capacity could shape editorial choices instead of audience needs. By late 2022, that system was approaching end of life, and an upgrade was estimated to take two or three months.

Solution

Accessible publishing without a production bottleneck

With WordPress, staff could create templates, arrange blocks and adapt page layouts without routinely involving a developer. That gave the team one set of publishing tools for recurring content and more complex storytelling. Active content creators increased ninefold, while training time fell by 95%.

For video storytelling, the team produced standard and audio-described versions, with human narration woven into the latter. A custom accessibility block placed a scrollable transcript beside the player and let viewers switch between those versions. It also remembered a viewer’s preference across videos, removing the need to select the accessible version repeatedly.

Familiar publishing tools also made it easier for the foundation’s staff, freelancers and other collaborators to contribute within the same editorial environment. The foundation released the plugin for other WordPress sites to use, extending its accessibility work beyond its own website.

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