Somebody joined your community eight months ago, stayed for six weeks, and left without a word. You noticed at the time, felt mildly bad, and moved on.
Here is a possibility worth sitting with. They could not follow the calls because there were no captions and your audio is a bit boomy. Or the main channel moved so fast with images and no descriptions that they were always reconstructing what everyone was talking about. Or the accent colour you love sits at a contrast level that makes small text genuinely painful to read for hours.
They will almost never tell you. That is the whole problem with this subject. People who find a space hard to be in usually just leave, because explaining is exhausting and they have done it a hundred times this year already.
So let us go through the practical stuff. Not compliance language, not a legal audit. Just the changes that make a community easier to be in, roughly in order of how much they buy you per hour of effort.
Start from the right premise
You already have members who need this. Not hypothetical future members. Current ones.
Hearing loss is extremely common and increases with age. So is low vision that is not blindness. Plenty of people have attention differences, chronic pain that makes long calls brutal, migraines triggered by motion, dyslexia, English as a second or third language, a hand injury from six weeks ago, or a small child asleep in the next room which means audio is not an option this evening.
That last example matters, because it shows the real shape of this. Accessibility work is not a favour for a small group. It is a set of design decisions that make your community usable in more of the circumstances real life produces. Captions help the person with hearing loss and the person on a train and the person whose flat has thin walls.
Captions and transcripts first
If you do one thing from this entire piece, do this one.
Automatic captioning is now built into most meeting tools and most video hosts, and it is good enough to be genuinely useful. Turn it on. It takes one setting change and you never think about it again.
Then, for recordings, publish a transcript alongside the video. Yes, machine transcripts contain errors. Publish them anyway with a line saying it is automated and may have mistakes. An imperfect transcript is dramatically better than no transcript, and this is the place where good intentions most often stall out waiting for perfect.
Transcripts have a lovely side benefit, by the way. They make your back catalogue searchable, both for members hunting for the thing you said in March and for search engines finding your public work. One decision, three payoffs.
While you are at it, when you speak, describe what you are showing. "I am putting up a chart, and the shape of it is that the line climbs steadily until about month four and then flattens." Takes six seconds, helps everyone who is listening while walking, and helps anyone who cannot see the screen.
Alt text without the agony
Alt text is a plain description of an image for people using a screen reader. Most platforms have a field for it. Most of us skip it because we are not sure what to write.
Simple rule: describe the information, not the picture. If you post a screenshot of a pricing table, the alt text is the numbers, not "screenshot of a pricing table." If it is a photo of your dog because it is Friday, "my dog looking guilty next to a chewed shoe" is perfect and takes four seconds.
If an image is purely decorative, mark it as such if your tool allows, or write nothing rather than something useless.
And here is the norm worth setting for your whole community: put text in the post, and use images to support it, not to carry it. When somebody posts a wall of text as a screenshot, the information becomes invisible to some of your members and unsearchable for all of them. You can model this gently without lecturing anyone.
Contrast, colour, and never colour alone
Two things here, both quick.
Contrast. Wherever you control the look of things, make text properly dark on light or properly light on dark. Grey text on a slightly different grey looks sophisticated in a design mockup and is miserable to read for an hour. There are free contrast checkers online, and you can test your community's key screens in ten minutes.
Never colour alone. If you use a colour to indicate something, add a word or a symbol too. Green for available and red for full does nothing for a lot of people. Green with the word open and red with the word full works for everybody.
Also, font size. Whatever you can control, err larger. Nobody has ever complained that text was too easy to read.
Make video optional and say it out loud
Camera-on culture is one of the quietest barriers in community life.
Some people cannot be on camera because of anxiety, appearance related conditions, a shared living space, bandwidth, or simply because it is nine at night and they have taken their face off for the day. If your calls have an unspoken expectation of video, those people stop coming, and the reason they give will be "scheduling."
So say it explicitly, every time, in the invitation and at the start: cameras are entirely optional here, and you are just as welcome with yours off.
Same for voice. Always keep the text chat live and treat it as equal, not as the overflow. Read out questions from chat. Answer them with the same energy you give a spoken question. If the only real way to participate is to speak aloud in front of thirty people, you have narrowed your community to the confident third.
Plain language is an accessibility feature
You have members reading your work in their second or third language. You have members with dyslexia. You have members reading on a phone at the end of a fourteen hour day.
So write shorter sentences. Use the ordinary word. Put the point at the top instead of building to it. Break long instructions into steps. Use headings so people can find their way.
Also be careful with idioms if your community is international, which yours is even if you think it is not. Phrases like "ballpark figure" or "hit it out of the park" are invisible to you and opaque to a member in another country. You do not need to strip your personality out. Just notice when a phrase only works in one culture, and say the plain thing next to it.
And spell out dates with the month written as a word, because 09/10 means two different dates depending on where your member lives, and you will genuinely lose attendance to this.
Motion, autoplay, and the wall of animation
Animated images can trigger migraines, nausea, and in rare cases seizures. Autoplaying video with sound is hostile to almost everybody.
You cannot control every platform default, but you can set a norm and you can respect it yourself. Keep animation out of headers and welcome areas where people have no choice about seeing it. If your community has a channel where people post reaction images, that is completely fine, but let it be a specific place rather than the whole house, so people can opt out of it without opting out of you.
Give people more than one way to take part
This is the structural version of everything above.
For every important activity in your community, ask: is there a second way in?
The live call has a recording and a transcript. The spoken question can be typed. The introduction can be written or posted as audio. The feedback session can be asynchronous for people whose day cannot include a fixed hour. The event that runs at nine in the morning your time gets a thread where people in other hemispheres can join over twenty four hours.
You are not building duplicates of everything. You are making sure no single format is the only door.
How to ask about needs without collecting medical data
This is the part people get wrong with the best intentions, so I want to be precise.
Do not ask members about disabilities, diagnoses, or health conditions. Do not add a field for it in your signup. Do not keep a list. That information is sensitive, you have no need for it, and storing it creates a real risk for the member and a real liability for you.
Ask about needs instead, framed around your activities. One optional free text box that says: "Is there anything that would make our sessions easier for you to join? Captions, timing, format, anything at all." That gets you the useful answer without ever putting a diagnosis in your records.
If somebody does tell you something personal, treat it as confidential forever. Do not mention it to another member, do not put it in a shared note a helper can read, and do not reference it in public even helpfully. And when the need is met, you do not need to keep the message.
You cannot do all of this at once
You will read a list like this and feel the weight of it. Do not try to fix everything this month.
Rank by reach. Captions and transcripts touch every recording you have. Contrast touches every screen. Video-optional touches every call. Those three are worth more than everything else combined, and all three are afternoon projects.
Then tell your members what you are doing and invite correction. "I am working on making this place easier to use. Captions are on from now, transcripts are going up with recordings, and cameras are always optional. If something here is hard for you, tell me and I will fix what I can." That paragraph is doing real work. It signals that this is a place where asking is normal, which is the thing that gets you the information you need.
Be honest about limits, too. If you cannot do live human captioning, say the captions are automated. If a platform will not let you change something, say so plainly rather than going quiet. People are remarkably generous with a founder who is straight with them and visibly trying.
Do this this week
Turn on automatic captions everywhere they exist. One setting, ten minutes.
Publish a transcript with your next recording, imperfections and all.
Run your community's main screens through a free contrast checker.
Say "cameras are always optional" in your next call invitation, and mean it.
Add one optional question to your onboarding: is there anything that would make this easier for you to join.
Then go find the member who went quiet three months ago and send them a friendly line asking if anything about the format was awkward for them. You might get nothing. You might get one sentence that changes how you run the place for the next five years, and that is a very good return on one message.