Elaina sits down and talks with Lisa Jamieson from Walk Right In Ministries about family caregivers, the holidays, and ways the church can better support them.
The training, content, gatherings and experiences that we’ve created for pastors, church staff and ministry volunteers produced with the assistance of like-minded colleagues serving in disability ministry have become our principal service. So much of what we’re able do to help churches welcome and support families, we accomplish by bringing together experts from other ministry organizations.
November is Caregiver Awareness Month. As someone who became one of my dad’s caregivers before I started school, I grew up thinking everyone in the world was aware of caregivers and caregiving. As a young adult my husband and I cared for a son born with a life-threatening medical condition, and his typical sibling. As members of the sandwich generation, my brother, sister, and I cared for our mother for 15 years after she was diagnosed with dementia. This explains why, when I first heard that November is Caregiver Awareness Month, I was incredulous, and I still am.
In this episode, Lauren Hickman shares her personal journey and calling to disability ministry, describing how God has guided her every step of the way to serve families impacted by disability.
In today’s episode, Sandra talks about the challenges small to normative-sized churches face in disability ministry and shares how the churches she’s been a part of have overcome these challenges.
What can we do to love our neighbors with disabilities? Offer them our presence. Spend time with them. I’m convinced far fewer people with chronic illnesses would be seeking physician-assisted suicide if they didn’t have to suffer alone. Get to know the neighbors whose child is picked up by a van on school days. Provide dinner to the person in your office caring for an elderly parent or a child with a disability. Invite them to join you at church for a worship service or some other activity.
As Jesus was teaching a large group of people, including church leaders, four men made it a priority to find a way to take their paralyzed friend to the Son of Man. And through their faith, Jesus healed the man both spiritually and physically. In this week’s episode, Garett Wall explores what our churches can learn from the urgency and faithfulness of the man’s friends and how God is glorified in all of it.
Today’s episode is a message of encouragement for those of you in children’s ministry who want to be more proactive about including kids with disabilities, including mental health and behavioral diagnosis. In your school district, it's likely that 20% of the students are receiving IEP or 504 accommodations to make learning easier for them. The message we share, the gospel, is important enough to be willing to make some accommodations for too in our ministries! So let's talk about why and how you can make your ministry more accessible!
Podcast co-host Sandra Peoples grew up with a sister with Down syndrome and now has a teenager with level 3 autism, so she knows how different the holidays can feel for a family like hers. But they don't have to feel different at church! With a few steps of consideration, she shares how families can feel included and valued. Let's make sure special-needs families can hear the message of hope this Christmas!
In this week’s episode, Beth Golik humbly shares about a time that we, Key Ministry, blew it. (On social media no less). Learn how you can easily avoid the same mistake.
Braille Works - How to Write Amazing Alt Text
@neorsd - NE Ohio Regional Sewer District Twitter Account
Key Ministry Video Roundtable Catalog
Welcome to Key Ministry: The Podcast. I’m Beth Golik, one of your co-hosts, and today I want to humbly share with you about a time that we, Key Ministry, blew it. On social media no less.
A few weeks ago, we shared an image on Twitter, along with some hashtags such as #DisabilityMinistry, #Inclusion, and #Belonging. A follower replied to that tweet with an emoji of a person walking with a probing cane—representing a blind person—and stated it was “ironic that they had to make an #AltTextRequest to this account”.
This gave our organization the opportunity to learn and improve and now we can use that experience to help others increase awareness about making their social media platforms more accessible.
So you can include a description of the image you are posting right in the body of the post and all your users, those who can see the image and those who can’t, have access to that description. But there’s another tool, that’s easy to use, that is specifically for screen readers to translate images to text. Alternative text, known as alt-text, is a description that is invisible except to those using screen readers.
Picture your favorite meme. Now, pretend you are talking on the phone describing this meme to a friend who has never seen it. That’s basically how you’ll want to describe an image using alt-text.
Here are some tips for you that I learned from BrailleWorks.com. I’ll share a link in the shownotes for this episode which you can access at keyministry.org/podcast.
You don’t need to include the words “picture of…” or “this is an image of…” in your description. Just jump right into the description.
Usually colors and shapes aren’t important to the message you are trying to convey and don’t need to be included.
If the image is purely decorative, like the border around text, it does not need to be described.
If there’s text on the image, whether it’s a meme or an ad, that text needs to be part of the description, too.
Some platforms do it automatically, although you’ll probably want to check to make sure that the description really completely captures the image. A quick Google search can help you navigate how to add or edit alt-text for all the various social media platforms. For Twitter, for instance, you can click on the +ALT button after you’ve uploaded an image and before you’ve posted. Don’t forget that images you share in emailed newsletters and images posted on your website need alt-text, too.
If you want to see alt-text in action, next time you’re on Twitter, I want you to visit one of my favorite accounts and you can click on the little ALT designation in the bottom left-hand corner of any of their images to read a description. They do a really great job with alt-text. Are you ready? You have to check out @neorsd which is the NE Ohio Regional Sewer District. I know, I know, you’re probably thinking you don’t need to follow a sewer district’s Twitter account, but trust me on this one. Enjoy. And you’re welcome.
If you’re listening to this podcast episode shortly after it drops, then I invite you to join us for a conversation on Wednesday, November 16, 2022 at noon eastern. The topic is “Inclusive Design in Social Media: Best Practices for Creating Social Media Content that is Accessible to Those with Vision and Hearing Differences.” Alt-text is definitely going to be part of that conversation, but there’s so much more; I really hope you will join us. You can sign up at keyministry.org/events. We especially encourage folks who use screen readers or other adaptive technology as part of their everyday experience to be part of the conversation. We all can best learn by asking the experts: the people with disabilities.
We will record that video roundtable, so if you miss that conversation, be sure to catch the recording on our Vimeo or YouTube channels or at keyministry.org/video-roundtable. Hey, while you’re on that page, go ahead and check out some of the other roundtables you may have missed. Lots of good information from your fellow ministry leaders.
Thanks for joining me today to learn about alt-text which is just one way of making your social media posts more accessible. If you found this helpful, please give it a five-star rating and share on your own social media or recommend it to a friend. And don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode of Key Ministry: The Podcast.
Ideally, every person is welcome and embraced by a church as Christ welcomes and embraces all with unconditional love. That, unfortunately, is not always expressed by the church. I believe in those moments when we do feel we need to leave, God’s love will guide the conversation and direct us towards a place that will be more welcoming and open to expressing the love of Christ for all people.
