Marketing Toolkit

Transit agencies often need to communicate with audiences who have special needs, for example, persons with disabilities or those with limited proficiency in English. These moments of communication could be in passenger information materials, on the telephone, at public events, or in additional instances when someone needs assistance understanding your materials. Here are best practices for communicating with these audiences.

• Provide a large-type version of your passenger information guide for persons with vision impairment. Other alternative formats such as Braille or a text file for use with a screen reader will need to be made available upon request.
• On your website, display schedules in HTML (rather than as images or PDFs) so that they can be “read” by individuals with sight impairment who use a screen reader. Include alt text tags for photos, maps and illustrations. Additional information about making your website accessible is available here, from the U. S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. 
• Provide telephone information via TTY/TDD and/or text to accommodate people with hearing impairment.
• If you provide real-time information, providing it via both text and an automated phone system makes it available to the broadest audience.
• See the “Rider Information” page on National RTAP’s ADA Toolkit for more about accessible formats.
  

• Title VI requires that vital documents, such as passenger information, ADA paratransit applications, public meeting notices, and surveys be translated for each eligible LEP language group that constitutes five percent (5%) or 1,000 persons, whichever is less, of the total population of persons eligible to be served or likely to be affected.
• When promoting public meetings, make it clear that a translator can be provided with advance notice.
• Identify gatekeeper organizations for ethnic and monolingual populations. These might be social service agencies, non-profits, or churches. These organizations can often assist with translation, providing referrals to local translators and assisting with outreach to the populations they serve.
• Google Translate steadily improves and can be used to translate your website into a wide variety of languages. If there is a key alternate language group you wish to reach, consider providing a human-translated page on your website with a link from the homepage.
• To learn more about Title VI requirements, as well as other civil rights rules, see the Civil Rights page of the Transit Manager's Toolkit.