Ideas to help the community during Covid-19

There are SO MANY awesome community initiatives coming out of this crisis so we are pooling them together in a one-stop-shop for helping people.

Isolation doesn’t have to be so isolating! There are still plenty of things we can be doing to help those in need in our local communities and around the world so let’s be kind to each other.

If you have suggestions of things to add to this list, send them in using this form.

• Write postcards, emails or send video messages to elderly people in care homes who can’t have visitors. Email this one in Dorset to start off with: trinitymanor.reception@barchester.com

• Donate blood - the need for donations hasn’t stopped and donation stations are still open

• Volunteer for the NHS! Even if you're worried about leaving home and exposing yourself or loved ones, you can volunteer from home to contact those at risk of isolation.

• Making masks, scrubs, scrub bags etc for essential workers - more info and instructions here

• Download a free toolkit for Community Leaders

• Join your local Covid Mutual Aid group and offer your support - Covid-19 Mutual Aid Local Groups are small groups of people setting up independently in communities to support vulnerable people in their local area through the outbreak. 

• Cook/prepare a school lunch, post it on the OLIO App withe the #cook4kids for families to collect. No-contact pickup is available. If you have food that will go to waste, share it :)

• Volunteer with the British Red Cross within your community - more info here

• Purchasing gift certificates to local restaurants, record stores, and brick & mortar retailers to provide an alternative revenue stream

• Hosting virtual happy hours with friends and family to bolster human connection

• Support Foodbanks - use Google to find your nearest one and see what they need to support those who need it the most

• Support the homeless community - see the Crisis website to find out how

• Buying tickets to future community events to show support for the greater community

• Go and work on a local farm to help feed the nation!

• Offering grocery store runs or meal delivery to the elderly and immuno-compromised

• Contributing financially to food banks for children who have lost access to daily meals during school closures

• Donating to artists, performers, and venues to show solidarity and continue the celebration of the arts

• Creating wishlists for direct delivery to non-profit organisations and shelters that cannot currently receive in-person donations

• Providing online attendance options for classes, concerts, church services and more to connect communities to meaningful experiences

3 simple ways to make your digital content more accessible

The world is becoming a much more accessible place for people with disabilities; most public buildings have a ramp for access and flights of stairs often have high contrast edging to make them more visible, but when it comes to the internet there’s still a lot of work to do. Here are a few quick and easy things you can do to help make your content more accessible to everybody. It’s easy to do and might help you to get some engagement from people who wouldn’t usually interact with your content.

1. Describe your photos

A quick description of a photo added to a social media post can be a big help to those with a visual impairment. Screen readers (the software that allows blind or visually impaired people to use phones or computers by reading out text) are getting smarter and they might sometimes be able to guess what’s going on in a photo, but the best way to be sure is by adding a little description yourself. If you’ve taken an awesome picture of yourself up a mountain a screen reader could describe it from anything from ‘photo’ to ‘photo of a mountain’ or even ‘photo of a mountain with a person’ and as cool as that is, it still lacks detail. A quick line from you saying ‘a photo of me standing at the summit of Snowdon’ would make a real difference to the story being told.

An example of adding a descriptive comment to an image…

If you have a blog or website, you might be able to add some ‘alt text’ to an image which won’t be visible on the blog or image itself but will be picked up by screen readers (this is what it’s for). If you’re not too worried about descriptions being visible, adding them as a caption will also work perfectly.

Most website editors will allow an ‘alt’ or descriptive field to add captions to images

2. Be mindful of using images with text in them

We know this is a big thing on the internet and social media with memes and quotes, but screen readers really struggle to read out text if it’s in an image. A quick write up of what the image says in the post or comments could really help. If you are organising an event and want to post an image with some details, that’s totally cool, but try to make sure the details are somewhere else in the post too!

If you are not sure if your text will be picked up, an easy test is to think about whether the text could be copied and pasted. If it can, a screen reader will probably read it out. If it can’t then there is a good chance it won’t.

3. Subtitle your videos

This is a good idea anyway as lots of people prefer to watch videos muted, but people who are deaf or hard of hearing will really appreciate it and it’s straightforward to do. Facebook and YouTube have options for adding captions built into them and they’ll even auto-generate or sync themselves. This will take a little bit more effort than the other tips here, but the benefits are far reaching.

Now you know a few ways to make your content more accessible, you can get started right away. It might seem strange to add a description of a photo saying exactly what most people will see to begin with, but most people won’t notice them or you could use them to add a bit more to the story.

If you want a little more inspiration, the Guide Dogs facebook page is a great example of things being done well.

You can also look at our blog to see how we’ve done things. We’re not tech experts but we do what we can and try to keep the workflow simple. If you have any questions at all you'd also be more than welcome to get in touch with us.