Book Review: Accessible Communications
A new guide promises to make accessibility achievable for time-pressed communicators.
Demystifying the process of making your organisational communications widely accessible is the focus of the brand-new book Accessible Communications.
It’s both a compelling business case for accessibility and an essential daily guide on how to deliver communications to the broadest possible audience.
Launch this week, it’s written by the experienced duo of Lisa Riemers and Matisse Hamel-Nelis.
Riemers is a London-based accessibility consultant with experience working across the public and private sectors. Hamel-Neils is a professor of public relations at the University of Durham, a communications and digital consultant, and a past chair of the diversity committee for the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC).
For the authors, being as inclusive as possible and ensuring your communications can reach and be understood by as many people as possible, taking into account their needs or barriers, is the essence of accessibility.
The book encompasses both strategic and tactical aspects. It covers the context of creating accessible communications, including the types of groups that face barriers, the nature of these barriers, what accessibility is, and why communicators should implement it immediately. It also explores how to influence your organisation to make it happen. It even dissects the importance of organisational culture to ultimate success.
Accessibility isn’t just the right thing to do, say the authors. Riemers and Hamel-Nelis are at pains to point out the economic sense of making your communications more accessible - and thus enabling your message to reach a wider audience.
They cite a battery of statistics and case studies in support of this argument. World Bank data estimates that exclusion can cost countries up to 7 % of their GDP. Or eye-opening statistics like the fact that 1 in 4 people in the UK has a disability, while 1 in 3 of us worldwide will need assistive technology in our lifetimes.
As the Riemers and Hamel-Nelis point out, all good communications should be targeted to your audience – and this book will help you deliver on that aim in your daily work.
Each chapter is thoughtfully structured and easily digestible. The authors have followed their own advice and ensured that plain English is used throughout, as they noted, “even lawyers don’t like legalese,” and the advice is tailored to the expectations of the corporate world. Plus, most of the actions here won’t bust the budget.
As all good guides do, it explains the various acronyms and terminology which govern this space, and can be confusing and, somewhat ironically, exclusionary if overused.
It includes, on the tactical side, a substantial and hugely valuable guide on how to audit, design and produce a comprehensive suite of accessible communications outputs.
For outputs, the starting point is the main web content guidelines (in the UK and internationally), which branch out into advice for producing accessible documents, social media, digital and print assets, video, audio, physical spaces, and more.
This can seem like a vast swathe of potential actions to take. Still, the authors’ mantra is “progress over perfection”, and that encourages readers to feel they don’t have to implement all the excellent advice in this book tomorrow - instead, we’re encouraged to start where we feel most comfortable or able to take action.
Accessible Communication: Create Impact, Avoid Missteps and Build Trust
Lisa Riemers and Matisse-Hamel Nelis
Kogan Page, 2025
About Claire Munro
Claire Munro Chart.PR, CMktr is an award-winning communications professional and manager with almost 20 years of experience in PR: in the public, private and third sectors, currently working in telecoms.
Claire has served on the committee of CIPR Scotland and holds a CIPR Diploma in Internal Communications and the AMEC International Certificate in Measurement and Evaluation.