At Salt + Light Media, we remain committed to removing barriers to those who may otherwise find it difficult to access our TV programming, website, and other ways we communicate. We renew our affirmation of the dignity of all people, and continue to celebrate their differences, uphold their right to meaningful job opportunities, and cherish their freedom to tell the stories of their lives. We seek to deepen our relationships with disability service organizations, advocacy groups, and all those with varying abilities and disabilities.

We have completed this progress report to meet our obligations under the Accessible Canada Act (ACA), the Accessible Canada Regulations (ACR), and requirements of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).

Reviewing our 2024 Accessibility Plan:

In 2024, we made a thorough plan to improve our accessibility across all of Salt + Light Media. Our goal was to review and improve the accessibility of the following areas:

1. employment
2. the built environment
3. information and communication technologies (ICT)
4. communication, other than ICT
5. the procurement of goods, services, and facilities
6. the design and delivery of programs and services
7. transportation

We began our plan to achieve these goals through a range of actions and approaches:

• Training and skills development for our employees, such as ways to improve our internal communication. 
• Incorporating the latest accessibility standards and best practices in television broadcasting, distribution, and production, web design, and internal and external communications technologies as best as we can.
• Prioritizing partners who also uphold these standards, and seeking to tell more stories of those in the disability community.
• Continuing to develop a welcoming, team-focused culture, where employees, partners, and friends of Salt + Light Media are encouraged to tell us what accommodations they need, such as building requirements, hardware, software, audio/visual equipment, and other workplace technologies.
• We recalled our in-depth staff consultation process from 2023, including questions about accessibility and accommodations.
• At the heart of our plan, proactively asking employees and partners what they need from us.

We maintained a strongly welcoming, collaborative work environment and continued to seek out partners and tell stories in our content that reflect our values. We carried forward the latest standards and best practices, such as implementing a monthly scan on our website using an accessibility assessment tool.

In September and October, our development department conducted an “Access to Hope” campaign, which raised awareness of our viewers' accessibility needs, and funds to help us better meet them.

Built Environment, Workplace Culture and Internal Communication

Built Environment: Our Toronto-based staff members continue to work entirely from home, except for production staff filming on-location and a few fundraising staff who need to receive mail. We continue to pursue options for a new Toronto office and will ensure that it meets required accessibility standards and the needs of our employees and guests. Our Montreal-based staff continues their hybrid office arrangement, splitting time between the accessible office space provided by our Church partner and working from home.

Workplace culture: Given the small size of our organization, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) vacancy meant that we held off on making large-scale changes to our vision and direction. That changed when our new CEO joined us in December. He has continued to foster a team-focused and person-centred work culture, and we have set off on a new direction for the organization. Employees and partners are welcome to offer their creative ideas and constructive feedback, and tell their managers what they need to succeed in their work.

Internal Communication: Our virtual meetings have shortened to an average of about 30 to 45 minutes, and we express the understanding that employees can go “off-camera” and take breaks during meetings.

Employment

From our 2024 Accessibility Plan: "We will proactively ask prospective employees what accommodations they might need. We will include that request in the job posting and description, during the interview process, and at other times."

2025 Internal Consultation: Did we include this or something like it in our job descriptions and interview processes for our new hires?

2025 Progress: We hired our new CEO, and brought on a number of freelancers. While we were unable to update our job descriptions, we proactively invited them to tell us if they need accommodations during the interview and on-boarding processes.

Design and Delivery of Programs and Services (technical)

From our 2024 Accessibility Plan: "Come September 1, 2024, Salt + Light TV will begin offering at least 4 hours per week of described video programming."

2025 Internal Consultation: Did we do so?

2025 Progress: Yes, as of September 1, 2024, we currently have 4 hours of programming with described video each week. Also, all of our programming is closed captioned, 24 hours a day, on all of our platforms.

Communication other than information and communication technologies + Design and Delivery of Programs and Services (content)

Since we are a media organization, our external communication overlaps with our programs and services. The following section focuses on our television, website, and digital content.

Inclusive Stories

From our 2024 Accessibility Plan: "We will continue to be on the lookout for compelling stories featuring members of the disability community for our in-house programs and third-party acquisitions."

2025 Internal Consultation: There were some segments in our magazine-style shows on the experience of aging and on ministries to those experiencing homelessness, including those in the disability community. Can you think of other stories or programs from the past 10 months that highlight the disability community?

2025 Progress:

Over the last year, we produced an increased number of stories highlighting those with accessibility needs. Here are some examples from our English-language magazine-style show, Behold:

• Season 5 Episode 8, “Memento Mori” segment: The sudden onset of a life-threatening illness lands a young powerlifter on death's doorstep.
• Season 5 Episode 7 (requires subscription to watch); Two segments stand out:
  • Accompanying and visiting those who are homebound
  • What doctors are learning about palliative care
• Season 5 Episode 3 (requires subscription to watch): includes a segment on a palliative care initiative started by Canadian bishops
• Season 4 Episode 3, “Shine Live a Star” segment: Visit the Sara Elizabeth Centre and spend time with the joyful and talented young adults that participate in the program.

Diverse Voices

From our 2024 Accessibility Plan: "We're developing a page on our website for independent producers and production companies to pitch programs, submit story ideas, and let us know if they have a program that can air on our channel. Members of the disability, Black, and Indigenous communities are very welcome to connect with us there."

2025 Progress: While we went in a different direction than this idea, we continue to procure, acquire and deliver programs in other ways.

From our 2024 Accessibility Plan: "We continue to build relationships across the Catholic media landscape, and hope to open up new opportunities for organizations to partner with us."

2025 Progress: We renew our commitment to dialogue with all our interview subjects and the communities they represent.

Communication Technologies:

We continue the long process of bringing our website into full compliance with WCAG 2.0 Level AA standards and are making the necessary updates recommended by the Userway Accessibility Monitor. This is happening in a few stages:

Short-term (complete): we prioritized our most popular pages, since those are also the ones that members of the accessibility community likely wanted to access most, such as the page hosting our Salt + Light Plus streaming service; we also introduced additions to our workflow such as crafting descriptive text for images in our blog, and updated our overall web code template to align with current accessibility standards. Going forward, we scan every new page we create and make any necessary changes the tool recommends.

We have now moved to the Medium-term phase, proceeding to pages with less traffic, and incorporating more accessibility considerations into our web and graphic design. These include:

• Mindfulness about fonts, type, colours, and colour contrasts, for example meeting minimum font size requirements
• Keeping up with AI fixes such as automated descriptive text for images, and tailoring them to individual pages
• Eliminating confusion by ensuring each page title, thumbnail image, and filename refers to one video or one playlist and not both (for example “Walking Together”)
• implementing alt tags on blog images into workflow when creating new blog posts
• Using same label/alt tag for images or buttons on different pages that go to the same page (for e.g. consistently using “donate now” not “click here”)

Both the short and medium phases are part of our Long-term plan of implementing ongoing practices, in which we are developing the habit of including accessibility needs in our web and graphic design. We continue to run a monthly scan with accessibility assessment tools that recommend changes, and make those changes as they come up. We'll also find out if some of those changes can be automated to make our site as accessible as possible, as quickly as possible. Current actions include: 

• Improving ongoing SEO and accessibility integration practices on the blog
• Refreshing our branding to incorporate accessibility concerns more consistently
• Ensure we use tools but build in processes and procedures independent of them, in case the tools stop working

We also launched our new Salt + Light Plus apps for Android and Apple mobile devices, which make our streaming service available in a clear, easily usable and portable format. All of our mobile apps have closed captioning available.