This is an actual post on the LinkedIn page of Caltrans, the California Department of Transportation.
To be perfectly clear, the only text in the posting is the introduction at the top: Caltrans is hiring a Research Data Specialist III to join our Office of Data Services and Technology team! Check out the flyer for more information. If you have questions about the position or how to get started, let us know below. #calcareers #civilservice #caltransjobs — the rest is just a solid image.
- Unless—perhaps! I am not an HR professional nor an ADA or California accessibility law expert, so perhaps not even in this case—unless your position has an unaccommodatable need for a sighted person, your job posting should be readable by a screen reader, not simply an image. I don’t know how many blind/vision-impaired people use LinkedIn, or what special extras they need to be able to do so, but I doubt they can access the content of this posting.
- In addition to those who have a vision disability, there are many more who won’t be able to see the image on this post — those, say, on slow connections (yes, those still exist) or on mobile, who choose to turn off images in order to save time or data. Some of them may be able to choose to load this image, but some of them will also be shut out of this post.
- Not only is the text in the image not machine-readable, it’s arguably not even human-readable. LinkedIn’s image display is small enough that even the sighted may have trouble making out the text. Fortunately, LI isn’t Twitter; posts can be of nearly unrestricted length—why not use it? Copy that text and paste it in the post itself!
(Better yet, make a job posting on the job site and then even job seekers who don’t actually follow your page are more likely to see it…but I digress.) - There’s a URL on the ‘flyer’ for the job posting, but it’s not a link — if you really want to see it, you’ll have to type it in by hand. (Hopefully the job description is also available at that URL, so simply adding it to the post might even help resolve the first two problems…)
As far as I can tell I’m not qualified for this position anyway, but…who knows how many who are qualified are unable to read this ‘flyer’…? Accommodation doesn’t just mean giving people the means to do the job, it means making sure they’re able to find out about it in the first place.
why?
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