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The Tempest is committed to leading the accessibility movement in media

When we first began The Tempest in early 2016, our company ethos was crystal-clear: evolving global conversations using inclusivity and diversity through every facet of our work. It is an ethos that has allowed us to compete alongside older, more established media entities, a set of values that every person on the team espouses on a day-to-day basis.

Through the lens of inclusivity and diversity as core values, growth took off – and continues to do so – with the conversations, realizations, and messages our platform fosters daily reaching millions from more than ninety countries across the world. Between 2016 and 2017, our audience grew by 500%. Our audience is composed of engaged, enthusiastic individuals who are seeking out their place in the world – mostly women, mostly politically engaged, and tapped into a larger reality that stretches far beyond their zip code.

Quite simply, our audience reflected our team at Tempest HQ – people we’d love to grab a coffee (or chai!) with to discuss anything from technology to travel, beauty to cultural realities.

As a young media company, our team consistently makes an effort to step back and gauge how we’re doing – and what we can do better. To stay stagnant is to strip our mission of its effectiveness, and besides – experimentation and smart pivoting is part of how The Tempest thrives.

[bctt tweet=”Tempest HQ has decided to actively incorporate accessibility into every initiative.” username=”wearethetempest”]

With that in mind, we came to the realization that while we were practicing inclusivity for much of our audience, we were falling short for a significant demographic: people with disabilities. With more than 1.3 billion self-identifying people with disabilities in the world, we were doing a disservice to crucial members of the world by failing to fully optimize our offerings for their consumption, too.  

Rather than attempt to brush this realization under the table, Tempest HQ has decided to actively incorporate accessibility into every initiative and product offering. Our pivot is spearheaded by our Co-Founder and CTO, Mashal Waqar, who notes that, “As a company, we have a considerable amount of power in shifting norms and expectations. As such, we are prioritizing and employing techniques to make sure our content, in all formats, including audio and video, will now be fully accessible. Quite simply, we are here to prioritize accessibility because it is a human right.”

[bctt tweet=”With inclusivity and diversity as core values, growth took off and continues to do so.” username=”wearethetempest”]

Through this shift, we hope to see more corporations, media outlets, and organizations move in a fully inclusive, accessible direction that brings the entire world to the table. We are still a ways from a world in which everything is accessible, but things are changing.

The Tempest is committed to being at the forefront of the accessibility movement.

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Senior News & Society Editor Asma Elgamal launches Policy channel to face the new political era

2016 was a tough year. In looking at the global political landscape, 2016 presented us with events like Brexit and the Trump administration, propelling hate groups into mainstream platforms and frankly terrifying the hell out of some of us.

[bctt tweet=”In times like these, the most powerful thing we can do is equip ourselves with knowledge.” username=”wearethetempest”]

Social activism hit a new high, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat – all became tools to resist and to make our voices heard. But even that sometimes, isn’t enough. As horrific as it is, a lot of the awful things that have been happening are completely legal. It’s like Hydra has infiltrated the highest levels and we are playing a very tricky game of dismantling policies while pretending that evil isn’t currently reigning over us.

“In times like these, the most powerful thing we can do is equip ourselves with knowledge,” Elgamal noted.

Like most things governmental, policies are shrouded in technical language, used to make things complex and drawn out. Some policies and legislation are incredibly long and honestly, that kind of information is not appealing to read. Although it’s super important to know what laws govern us, who really has the time to go through all these new documents to ascertain what is going on?

It’s hard to speak out against something that we don’t really understand.

So to help us deal with the aftermath, Asma Elgamal, our Senior News & Society Editor at The Tempest decided to approach things in a different way, launching the Policy channel at The Tempest.

Elgamal said, “The sole purpose of this vertical is to target and help decipher laws and policies so that everyone knows exactly what is going on. The aim of this is so that it is easier to understand which policies affect you and what they set out to do. In turn, preparing us for doing whatever is necessary to combat these policies.” Read more about The Tempest’s Policy vertical here.