Why organisations are failing to deliver digital accessibility, and how to fix that

Jonathan Hassell: This month is all about why organisations are failing to deliver digital accessibility and how to fix that. I do mean organisations, not products, not websites. This is literally how do we get this right in the organisations that we work in?

The reason that we’re doing this is that there’s a lot of “State of Accessibility” reports come out normally around this time of the year where people like WebAim, for example, test a million pages of websites to see how good they are at accessibility. Oftentimes the results are a little bit dispiriting if we’re honest. Accessibility hasn’t moved on massively since last year. People’s delivery of accessibility is increasing and going up, but not necessarily to the level we want.

The other reason those things are dispiriting is they never really tell you why. That’s what we’re about today. Who cares how many organisations out there are doing brilliantly for accessibility? What we need to know is what’s working? How as an organisation should you be setting yourself up so you actually deliver well. What can you do about getting better as people who are working in the organisations that you’re working in, but also together as an accessibility community. That’s what we’re looking at today.

It’s based around a research report that we’ve recently published, and hopefully Hannah will be popping a link in to the chats, so you’ll be able to have that very easily and find the report. That’s great. I can see that there. If you haven’t downloaded the report yet, it’s completely free. Please go ahead and do so because there’s a lot more riches in that that you can get after. Yes, I can see people doing it on my phone down here at the moment. That’s lovely. Thank you. We’ve got loads of insights in that report, and what we’re trying to do is to bring those to you today.

The report is the result of the analysis of information given to us through our ISO 30071-1 Digital Accessibility Scorecard from over 300 private and public sector organisations from all over the world. It’s going to give you some answers for the sorts of things that organisations are struggling with, the things that they’re doing well with. There will be some answers in here hopefully, to some of the questions that you have, but we want your questions as well. As I say, pop them in the chat, and we’ll do our best to look at the specifics for you as we go through. For those of you who haven’t used the Scorecard yet, I would really encourage you to do that. It’s completely free. It takes about 15 minutes, you answer about 70 questions, and what you get from that is a score to say how mature your organisation is for accessibility, and a report that tells you some good next steps for you to do from where you are. What you’re going to get today, if you like, is the next steps for 300 organisations together. But it won’t tell you specifically what you need to do in your organisation. If you do the Scorecard, then you will get that because there will be specific next steps in there depending on the scores that your organisation is getting. Today we have, if you like, the amalgamated view.

We’re going to be taking you through five particular things that we learned. Organisations have good intentions but lack capability and responsibility. Lack of senior buy-in is getting in the way. An ad hoc approach to accessibility and failure to embed things is really limiting progress. It’s often thought about late in the product development cycle, and so how could you fix that? Finally, a few more barriers around things like return on investment. Why would you do this in the first place, and if you get good at it, how can you prove to the people who are sponsoring your programme that it’s good business? That’s what we’re about today. I’m going to take the first two. I’m going to hand over to Pete for a couple, and then I’ll come back in at the end of the sandwich a little bit later on.

Good intentions are not enough. Responsibility and capability are needed to deliver on them. Here’s the way things are working in three different elements of accessibility maturity. Motivation, which is, do we want to do this? Capability, which is, do our staff know how to do this and responsibility, which is whose job is it to do this? As you can see on the graph on the screen in front of you, both the public sector organisations and the private sector organisations are doing pretty well in terms of motivation, but much more poorly when it comes to capability and responsibility. That is one of the reasons why, even for example, here in the UK where we’ve got PSBAR, the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Requirements, that actually require public sector bodies to be good at accessibility, the delivery that’s actually coming out of a lot of those bodies is not doing as well as it needs to be. In fact, they’re doing a little bit better in terms of capability and responsibility than the private sector, but not much. Why is that important? Well, because of this.

Capability is about whether or not the people who create your digital stuff, whether it’s websites, apps, social media, anything like that, are able to do that in a way that has accessibility as a value, an embedded value of all of that content, all of that functionality that they’re creating. Getting accessibility right affects all roles, and the key thing, if you are starting out on the creation of a website or marketing campaign or whatever, is, do the people who are working on that campaign or site actually know how to deliver accessibility, because if they don’t, that’s your big problem.

So here’s the first of the percentages that you’re going to get from the report. Unfortunately, only three percent of organisations have got a formal way of asking their teams, are they any good at accessibility? That’s really problematic. It could be that most of these organisations really know how good their teams are because their teams are very stable and they’ve been with them for a long time. But I don’t know if that sounds like where you work. The word churn is normally the word used for staff in most organisations of any size that we work with, there are lots of people coming and going, and actually the ability of those staff to know what they need to do to make things accessible is more probably dependent on where they have come from and how you recruited them. Did you ask questions about if they could do accessibility, if they’re a developer, you’re just about to hire? That sort of thing. Most organisations aren’t doing that yet. And when you ask people, they’ll always say yes because you really don’t want to answer no to a question about, are you any good at accessibility? Because most people know that if you’re not, chances are you’re a bit of a risk to the organisation. So most organisations who are getting good at accessibility have a formal way of checking to see if their staff can do this. We provide these sorts of things. Capability reviews, so staff capability reviews.

Here’s a quote from one of the managers when we gave them the reports back. “Many of our people don’t know what they’re doing with accessibility, but think they do. Others are good at it, but didn’t have the confidence to do it before you told us.” That’s really common. Oftentimes it’s the developers who think they know more than they really do, and it’s the designers who know more than actually they’re letting on. Maybe they just need a bit of confidence to go forward.

Fundamentally, you need all of your teams to be doing good for accessibility. So things like training, either live or via videos, guidance documents. It could be things like our Snapshot Audits that will allow your staff to have a demonstration of why one of your products might not necessarily be as accessible as they think it is. All of these different things are ways of trying to get the behavioural change and upskilling you really need to get accessibility going well. We’re going to be showing you things that aren’t going well. We’re going to be showing you examples of companies that are doing well.

Here’s the first. This is HSBC. I’m actually going to an awards do tonight where they’re up for best accessibility in the UK. They’re doing really well. We’ve been working with them for a long time, since 2013, and the reason why they’re doing well is mostly because of this guy at the top here, Malintha Fernando. He’s the founder of the programme, and he was the person who said, okay, this needs to happen. I’m going to put my neck on the line and tell people they can’t launch products that aren’t accessible and see what happens, and that has really made his career. He’s an incredible individual. He took responsibility to make it happen. Where people take responsibility, things happen. So if you don’t know whose responsibility it is to actually deliver accessibility in your organisation, that could be part of the problem. He’s taken them on a ten-year journey. They’re not quite there yet, but they want to be the most digitally accessible financial services provider in the world.

The key thing to actually getting to where they’re at at the moment, getting good, is the training programmes that we’ve been running for them ever since about 2015. We haven’t just trained employees, we’ve trained their vendors, their digital agencies, their marketing agencies, even their vendors these days. This is the sort of thing that’s got HSBC to the point where they are now delivering the most accessible banking website in 11 of their 13 top markets. They’re doing great because responsibility and training came together. That’s the sort of thing that you really want.

But the other key to their success has been getting the exec leadership bought in because they are the people, if you like, who’ve been paying for all of that training, and that’s part two. So the second thing is lack of senior level buy-in and ownership is really holding things back and the sort of commitments that people are making aren’t always helpful.

So here are the figures. About 47 percent of organisations don’t have a board member responsible for digital accessibility. It’s great, the 53 percent of those who took our Scorecard do, but that number still needs to be going up. All of those 47 percent of organisations, if they are trying to get accessibility to happen, do not have a seat at the top table. They don’t have anybody at the C-suite or the board level saying, accessibility is really important, this must happen, here is the money.

The next thing is that 39 percent of organisations don’t have anybody responsible for embedding digital accessibility. You’re going to hear that word embedding all the way through what we’re talking about today. It’s not enough to just get it right on one website. It’s actually about getting it right across all of the sorts of things you do in the organisation. And to do that well, you need somebody whose job it is to really push, how do we make sure that all of the different parts of the organisation are doing this, and doing this in an efficient way? Thirty-nine percent of organisations don’t have anybody whose job it is to try and actually make this happen. That again is one of the things that’s holding people back.

But let’s give you an example of where things are working. Fleishman Hillard are a marketing agency, and this is the commitment that they’ve made, rather like a lot of different organisations who’ve made commitments to The Valuable 500. Fleishman Hillard were on a mission to be the most inclusive communications agency in the world. That’s not enough. “We won’t stop until we make the world a more inclusive place.” That sounds brilliant, doesn’t it? And even better, it’s actually coming from the President and CEO of the organisation. That person, if you like, is to be relied on. If it was coming from somebody a lot further down the organisation, they might want that to happen, but they don’t have the power to make that happen within the organisation. Somebody right at the top saying the right things opens the door.

But the other reason why I like that is because it’s not specific. You see commitments need to understand the scope or challenge of accessibility and be achievable. Lots of Valuable 500 commitments, if you look at them, seem to be a little misguided maybe. Organisations who are going too far and saying, all of our websites are going to be accessible by a particular date. Do they know how much that’s going to cost them? Did they actually think about that before they made the commitment? Do they know if they have a team who are going to be able to deliver on that? These sorts of things are probably things they should have been thinking about before the commitment.

The other thing is a lot of those Valuable 500 commitments, are really, shall we say, they don’t understand the scope of accessibility. So there’s loads that say, we’re going to put captions on our video for our staff. That’s probably one of about 200 things that you need to do to make things accessible. It’s not accessibility. You really need to understand what you’re trying to make accessible and what is possible? Is it actually achievable? Do you have people who can actually make this happen? Because finding the right people can be really difficult. But that’s the really positive news. That’s in organisations who have really committed. What about if you actually haven’t committed at all in the organisations that you work in?

Well, here’s one way of thinking about how to go about talking to the people at the top. Diversity and inclusion is really big for most organisations. But actually of all of the different protected characteristics in diversity and inclusion, disability and age, the two ones that actually require accessibility when it comes to digital, are the ones that often get missed. They’re also the largest groups. So if your organisation is doing diversity and inclusion for other groups, but not for people with disabilities, you can go to those people to say, actually, I think there’s a real opportunity for us here.

The other thing is to look at the business opportunity more specifically. We run workshops for a lot of organisations to try and enable them to understand what benefits of accessibility would be available to their organisation if they got good at it – financial, ethical, legal, and innovation benefits. It will be different for different organisations. But there are at least 40 or 50 benefits depending on the type of organisation that you work in, that could really work for you.

The other thing, and we’ll come back to it at the end, is return on investment. If your organisation actually does work in this area, will you get the money back? We’ll come on to that later. Another action you can do is, as I say, the Scorecard is really good and our expert benchmarks around ISO 30071-1, are really brilliant at opening your eyes up to the real scope of accessibility. Yes, it’s not just videos, but actually, it’s not even just websites. Even if it was just websites, there are different aspects about how websites get put together that make up what we term accessibility maturity. So things like that motivation, responsibility, and capability we were talking about. But you’re going to hear us touching on things like governance, policies, product development, support. All of these different areas are things you need to understand to get really good as an organisation. You also will probably want to look at that in comparison to others in your area, your competitors, are they ahead of you or behind you? If you can get that information – and it’s the sort of thing that we do in our benchmarks. It can be the thing that gets you the budgets to catch up or actually overtake the competition.

I’m going to hand over to Pete now who’s going to take us into the next part, which is all about embedding accessibility across the organisation. Pete over to you.

Peter Bricknell: One of the things we got back was the failure to embed digital accessibility across the organisation. A lot of people put a focus on standards called WCAG. I see that a little bit like spell checkers and grammar checkers. Whatever you produce, you’ve got to produce good spelling and good grammar whatever language you put it in. But it’s not going to write a novel. When we start looking at accessibility more and more, we see that it’s not just the website. Let me show you an example of that.

Let’s imagine you care for Game of Thrones, something on TV and you’ve been watching House of the Dragon on a friend’s Sky TV box. In other countries it’ll be some other satellite broadcaster. Then you say, I really love that. A lot of people sit there, watch TV these days and go on Twitter and go on something else. Then they’ll look at Twitter and say, well, there’s some video on that, but I’m missing something because there’s no captions on that video on Twitter, but I did see it on Sky. So I then say, well, what’s it like when I go to YouTube? Then I say, that’s great. Now I can see it again, but I’m now dependent on the accessibility of YouTube. And the YouTube site takes me over to the House of Dragon site, which is great. Then they’ve got some videos there, and those may or may not include captions and each of those sites may or may not have thought about accessibility. And so finally, you go and say, well actually, I’ll sign up to HBO Max and get House of Dragon and everything else that they’ve got. So as you can see from their journey, that individual has the same accessibility needs. But the House of Dragons product is being displayed on four or five different mechanisms. If you’re sitting there saying, well, I’m the website manager for HBO on the website, so that’s the fourth across. That’s all I need to worry about, and somebody else looks after social media and somebody else looks after the HBO site, you actually need to work together. If you’re going to put something on YouTube or Twitter, the person who manages social media needs to think about how they make Twitter accessible, how they make YouTube accessible, and not just your website.

So when we then looked at and we asked people how they do accessibility training and think about that, only 1 in 20 of the organisations that came back to us said they do provide accessibility training to the whole organisation. You’ll often say, well, what we need to do is get our UX designers or developers working on this. Yet once you’ve built a site, it’s the content authors, the people who put material on your website, the people who put it on social media, the people who publish this with marketing, they need to understand it so that they design the banners, the pictures, the posts, and the messages. And if they’re not getting training, then we’re missing.

If you’re in an organisation that sells a product where you’ve got a website behind it. Do the salespeople understand accessibility? We’ve been working with a number of global advertising agencies and the sales staff need to understand accessibility so that they bake that into the cost and they bake that into the plan so that the guys building it can actually build it well, to spec, and profitably. So thinking about the whole experience is quite important.

An example of that is the UK Parliament Digital Service. They think about creation of digital materials and think about it beyond a website to customer service. They’ve got 10,000 internal customers of varying ages, abilities, and disabilities, and you can’t assume any one role, or one seniority, has a disability or not. For example, one of our clients, one of the board has visual needs around colour blindness. So when they get reports, the team needs to think about where they put the reds, greens, blues, and browns. Because that person wants to be able to make decisions and they don’t want to have to ask, is that a good or a bad figure that I’ve got here? So we think about it across everybody.

So what they did is they used our customer service speed dating approach, where we brought a number of people together. We can do that physically, but in this day and age typically over Zoom, where there’s a number of people who have common disabilities and they talk about their experience in the context of the particular industry or the particular situation. People in your organisation can ask them questions, hear their story, and put a face to the name of it. And another client we had, we did this about a year ago. As we start re-talking to people around the organisation, the speed dating really stuck in their minds. They really understood for once, from a stat, where we showed a percentage of 30 percent to, this is Emma, this is Fred. This is a person and they have a life that they want to get on and just get on and do with. The staff then became more engaged, more enthusiastic, and more confident. They could see the whole experience and not just the website.

In fact, it’s worth looking at your whole supply chain, whatever industry you’re in, whether you’re public sector or private sector. Because you’ll suddenly realise that actually to solve a problem, you may well have multiple suppliers, multiple tools, and portals, and is the experience consistent across them? Let’s just take a retail example.

If I’m going to buy a sofa, and I’m going to need somebody to install it for me. I might go to your website and say, oh, I like that sofa. Then I book it. Then there’s a point which says, which date would you book it? That might be within your site or it may be you have a portal to the sofa’s specialist who you book with. Then as they take it out of the warehouse, the employees need accessibility to use a warehousing tool, and I don’t know how many of you have been around warehouses where the warehousing tool looks like it’s out of the 1980s. Not very accessible, not very easy to use, and not very intuitive. Then the customer wants to think about some help and FAQs, like how do I get the sofa in the building? What do I need to think about the path for the sofa? What do I need to think about the delivery truck around parking near me? Then you might have track and trace, which could be internal, but quite a lot of people have it externally with Royal Mail or other people, and so you may be overlaying your brand on top of the supplier portal or a direct access. Then there’s notifications. There’s email, there’s SMS, there’s something in the app. Then if they didn’t like the product, they want to return it. So you go to another site to print the return label and book a pickup. Suddenly you realise you’re looking after 4, 5, 6 different portals, different customers, and different tools and for that person with a disability, they need to have a consistent service all the way through.

When we looked at some of the responses, and we asked about integration with operations, 32 percent of organisations say they do stipulate this as a contractual requirement to external suppliers. When they buy in products, freelancers, digital agencies, good, 32 percent but that’s actually 60 percent who are not. Then very few actually ask whether the suppliers are actually trained in digital accessibility. We had a rather embarrassing moment for one client where they had contractually agreed that the team would be knowing what they do about accessibility and then when they delivered it, the supplier didn’t deliver with good accessibility needs. So there was a big conversation, a big embarrassment. Well, who’s going to pay for the fixes? If you are a vendor, make sure your team are trained, and if you’re a buyer, make sure what you’re buying digitally has got the team trained and the product will be accessible.

Then very few companies, 14 percent, actually check that the suppliers meet their accessibility standards. The embarrassment on that is, if you then get sued, who’s going to cough up the money and the cost of being sued might’ve been the cost of actually getting this right. Well, probably the cost of being sued is far more and reputational damage.

Then 37 percent said that accessibility wasn’t embedded as a requirement in the procurement process. The procurement team aren’t thinking about this, you’re hoping your requirements group are saying I need a product, are thinking about this. But this could go from things like training systems, recruitment systems, finance systems, expense systems, stuff that matters for the employee as well as stuff that matters for your customer where you might have those components like the booking of a delivery, and if the supplier who’s managing that isn’t making it accessible, your whole experience is failing. And if you’re in public sector, you as the public sector organisation, may be failing to meet the public sector requirements because your supplier, who gave you a portal, fail to deliver.

So let’s take what works. Haleon’s a new brand, they used to be called GSK, they’re the consumer products part of GSK. They have launched themselves for health with humanity. Just that phrase, humanity says, well, that means everybody, doesn’t it? So they’ve been looking at accessibility end-to-end. And only in the last week have they published an exciting initiative which is, instead of putting QR codes on packaging, you just take a picture of the actual packaging and then that displays information. So they’re going to do it for 1500 everyday consumer health products in the UK and USA.

It links packaging, artificial intelligence, and digital interface. But it could be things like allergy information. It could be medical information. I went to the pharmacy recently and got a package of a particular cream and when I opened it up and read the really small writing about what it’s used for, what it wasn’t used for, that cream wasn’t appropriate for what I needed to use it for. I went back to the pharmacy and they said, well, you didn’t tell us. Now, if you are poor-sighted, wouldn’t it be great to click on the packaging, it tells you what you’ve got so you can know which package you’ve got and it tells you, here’s the allergy information or here’s the useful information and I can listen to it and I can deal with that? That can help everybody whether you’ve got an accessibility need or not.

So when we’re thinking about this, it’s worth thinking about the end-to-end journey. We do that with Snapshot Audits, very rapid tests around design. Here’s what you’re thinking about the website. Have you thought about these? It can be before you launch, it can be before you test or what we’ve done with a couple of organisations is take their end-to-end journey and then brainstorm what the accessibility needs in each part.

For example, if you’re an organisation that uses influencers, do those influencers understand how to do social media? If you’re doing marketing events, do your marketeers know how to choose a product that does the registration process, that does the map, in a way that’s accessible? But it could also be at the other end, recycling the product. Where do you get the guidance of what parts you can recycle, how and where? I was sitting with one organisation and I was like, oh, I didn’t realise you had to take it all apart to recycle. I just put it all in the recycle bin and said, oh no. And I was like, well, I never knew that’s how you recycle that product. So that’s thinking end-to-end.

Then the other challenge is, it’s thought about too late in the product life cycle. There’s a great quote here from one of the team leads at TD Bank in Canada. “If you don’t, design for accessibility it’s like saying to every fifth person who walks in the door, I don’t really want your business.” I had that with my mum only yesterday. We went into a branch of a bank. She couldn’t open a bank account properly online because she’s got poor sight. She tried to phone them up and she’s got poor hearing. So we went into the branch, and they do have a ramp for her wheelchair to go in there. We said, look, we’d like to open a bank account and they said, ah yes, well, the person who opens a bank account is only here twice a month. So I said to them, how were we supposed to know that before we walked in? And she kind of looked at us dumbfounded, just like, I don’t know, you’d have to phone us first. So I said to my mum, maybe we just buy the savings account from another bank.

So when you’re thinking about this, quite a lot of organisations put a focus on WCAG compliance and auditing and let’s spend money on auditing to make sure we’ve got it right at the end, because we want to meet the answer. But the cost of fixing, the cost of getting it right is exponential over the life cycle of development of a product or a website. If you get it in design it costs you one times as much. If you’re looking at it at acceptance testing or even operations, it costs a fortune, and time and time again, we hear that’s a problem. We can’t afford accessibility because it’s so expensive. Then when they’ve got the audit, the audit’s really got a lot of fixes and we can’t afford to do this.

So let’s think about what we’ve been hearing about getting the requirements right in the process, thinking about planning the sprints and testing, think about prioritising and the launch. What have we heard back on them from the survey? We see that 20 percent think about accessibility at the design stage, which is great. But are you thinking about it? Then 40 percent of it was only considered in some digital products. So how can you be sure that those are the ones where somebody who’s got a need is going to use the product? So it’s worth thinking about at the start, and unfortunately, very few people are.

Then the next part is planning testing, planning your sprints. How often do you check accessibility of site snaps? Don’t know. About a third as ad hoc. A third is regular and a third is, we don’t. So that’s 30 percent who don’t check accessibility of your sites and apps. So you have no idea if one, it’s going to work at the start. But even once you’ve launched it and are running it, when people make changes, how do you know you haven’t broken something? We’ve been using for our Scorecard, it’s a great product. And about a year or so, maybe two years ago, we were working with the developers of it. And you could see that each time we recommended some accessibility tips, they put them in, which was great. Then they did a new release and many of those accessibility tips disappeared in the next release because the developer wasn’t thinking about it.

So it’s not a one-time moment to say, yep, it’s accessible. You’re going to have to think about regularly checking it. Nearly 40 percent, 37 percent say they don’t check the products before they’re launching. What we often see is people say, it’s too much, we’ll just launch it and think about accessibility afterwards. Which is a bit like saying – 20 percent of the customers, I don’t really care about them. If you went to your Chief Executives and said, I’ve got a way of growing our customer base by 20 percent. I think they would say, and how much should we spend on that? Yes, well £1,000. Well probably they would want to spend much more and they’d probably want to do it well.

So the last part before you launch is prioritising fixing. When you do an audit and you get a response back, only 30 percent said they’d fix the accessibility issues with digital products. Typically because we’ve got to get it out, we’ve spent our budget, we haven’t got time. When that’s the case, over a third said they would launch a product with known accessibility issues. The risk is people then say, well, we know it’s got these problems, we’ll just put it in the accessibility statement to say we didn’t quite get there. If you’ve thought about getting the requirements right and the cost is much cheaper then, then actually you’re making the digital accessible products an aim and a result rather than an apology at the end.

So what happens when you fix these? Thirty percent said they would fix issues with digital products. What we do find is organisations get stuck at the audit stage. Rather than fixing the issues, they look for exemptions. They can try and look at mitigating the risks. But then what was the point of doing an audit if you’re not going to fix it? There are ways and our last webinar talked about ways to think about prioritising. It doesn’t mean you have to fix all of them all at once. But there are ways of deciding what sequence, what timing should you fix those accessibility issues and how do you bring those back to be much more cost-effective by designing it to be successful at the front.

There’s two parts of thinking about this. One of them is to look at your policies and procedures and documentation. In the ISO standard, there’s about 30 odd different types of documentation. And we go through with an organisation and say, what have you got? When we look at this, how recent is that information? How complete is it? How does it fit? Is it used?

Then the other part is thinking about the governance process. How are you looking at accessibility in governance? When you think about a business case, when you think about design, how do you think about it in testing? What approach do you take to prioritisation? What approach do you take to being on a journey? So those things help embed it. Again, we have people who are really good at this, and they struggle because the governance doesn’t support them. So one product is great, but the others aren’t learning about it.

A quick example of this, and I’ll move back to Jonathan, is Bequeathed. They did the first round of trying to build a system in the traditional way, doing audits at the end, and realised that they hadn’t really taken accessibility into account the first time round. And yet it mattered in the way that they dealt with it and the types of audience they have around developing wills. So they had an accessibility audit done, but they needed to plan how to fix it and they had multiple organisations and agencies involved. So instead of saying, well, let’s just take the audit route and fix, they spent some of the money they had reserved for audits into thinking about an implementation plan for fixing issues, a testing plan that meant it was repeatable, and then a means of proving the accessibility. So that they moved from fixing every audit to a team that were skilled to get it right at the start every time. The great news was they then got recognised as a finalist in a digital SME category in the year that they went live. So that’s thought about the external view, that’s thought about getting it right. I’ll pass back to Jonathan.

Jonathan Hassell: Thank you everybody. Really good questions coming through. I’m not going to be able to see the questions, but we’ll sort it from there. Key barriers for improvement is the last section and then we’ll have a wrap-up and a little bit of time for questions at the end if we have time.

We’ve talked about skill spaces. We’ve talked about them, how they work for your staff, but it’s as much for your digital suppliers as well. Just a few things are the barriers that often get in the way. We’ve mentioned organisations not embedding things as requirements in their procurement, not checking that their external suppliers are trained. If the products that you are creating are created for you, either wholly or in part by other organisations and you don’t check that, you are really in trouble because your ability to deliver products actually comes down to your contracts with those organisations and your relationship with them, not whether or not your developers and your designers know their HTML and their WCAG. We’ve also talked about accessibility training quite a lot on the call. We haven’t really touched on governance quite so much.

What we found was 10 percent of the organisations that were in the research had an up-to-date digital accessibility policy and plan. 17 percent said they had a policy, but it’s out of date, and 40 percent didn’t have any policy in place. If your organisation doesn’t have one, how do your staff know whether or not this is a really important thing to do or not? In general, organisations that don’t have these in place are either confused or just don’t do accessibility.

Return on investment. I said we’d come back to it at the end. Return on investment is really important. The people at the top of the organisation are going to be wanting to think cost benefits about everything. What is the cost of accessibility? Well, 5 percent of organisations are measuring their spend on digital accessibility. That means 95 percent are doing accessibility in a haphazard way. Lots of different parts of large organisations doing things on their own. Nobody knows even how much money is being spent. That’s not a responsible way of doing these things and it won’t give you any friends at the top table.

62 percent aren’t measuring return on investment at all. There are a number of measures in our Scorecard about how you could claim that you are getting return on investment. I’ll show you one in a moment. 62 percent not measuring anything. So basically money going in, we don’t know how much. Money going out of the company into accessibility. How much benefit are we getting from it? Most people out there have no idea. You really need to get good at this for you to actually have a lot of buy-in from the people at the top.

We’ve been working on return on investment for years and years and years. One of the latest things that Pete and the team have been doing is around different models for different types of organisation. For example, if you were say an organisation like a telecoms company where you have a lot of churn of customers and you’re always trying to retain them every year and it costs you loads of money to do that, if you actually did better at accessibility, would you retain more of those customers? Because actually, if 20 percent of the population has a disability, another 20 percent are older, if they’re not getting a good experience from you, they’ll move on to a different supplier as soon as they can. So what do you do to retain them? How much value could that be to the organisation? That’s the sort of stuff that we’re looking at there. If that would be helpful for you, please get in touch.

Here’s an example of ROI working for one of our clients. This is Scope, they’re a charity that represents people with disabilities. In 2018 they came to us to say they were creating a new website. They really wanted it to be a really great exemplar about how great accessibility could be. But actually they had loads of staff churn so they were concerned that their staff didn’t know how to do this and they weren’t creating the website anyway, they were creating the content. It was being created in terms of the code and design by an external development partner. They didn’t know how good they were.

They asked us to test things before we went live and we said, no, you’re right at the start of the project, take the budget from the test at the end, and put it into training at the beginning. Because if we can do that, then you can start getting this right from the beginning rather than panic at the end that you’ve got everything wrong. That got them an amazing site. It won the BIMA Award for Inclusive Design in 2019. But more important than that was they didn’t need us after that. If we’d have tested their site and told them that everything was wrong, the next time they created a site, they’d need us to test it again. Now, because we trained them in how to get it right and how to test their own stuff, they don’t need us. That’s what we term ROI. That’s real return on investment for the money for them.

Last bit, what can you do about this then in your organisation or as part of the accessibility community? From our perspective, what you’ve seen today is a number of organisations who we’ve named who are doing this well. We name those who are doing well, we keep quiet about those who aren’t. Everybody in the stats is completely anonymous. But what you can see there is that some are doing well and lots aren’t. If you take your organisation on this journey, there is still the possibility of really being in the vanguard, leading the world, at being good at this sort of stuff.

From our perspective, we look at things for most companies, people with a disability or who have an access need are the invisible 20 percent, they are the people they forget. If you actually start thinking about those people systemically throughout the entirety of what you do, they can become the loyal 20 percent, the people who come to you and stay with you because they know that you actually care about their needs. That is the opportunity that’s available here.

How do you get there? Six steps, and then a couple of minutes for questions. Recognising the value. You need to make sure, especially the people at the top know what benefits and what return on investment you can get from accessibility. You need to measure and track that stuff so you can prove you’re actually getting it.

Adopting a strategic approach throughout the whole organisation, baking in accessibility wherever possible. Treating this like you would treat things like information security, resilience, environmental management. You’ll see that that ISO that I talked about had the number 1 at the end of it. The other ones that have 1 at the end of it are Information Security – that’s 27001, Resilience – 22301, Environmental Management – 14001. You’re seeing what’s happening here. Actually, what we’re trying to do is to enable organisations to see that accessibility is as important as those other things that they wouldn’t dream of not doing. That’s what we’re about.

Defining responsibility, getting the senior level buy-in, then getting that person to drive, to create a plan, drive it and report, making sure that you’re doing that not just for products but policies, processes, and training. Making sure that they communicate that internally and externally. Internally to all of your staff, externally to all of your suppliers, but also all of your customers who need to know you really care about this stuff and you’re going on a journey and actually you’d love their feedback.

Focusing on the user experience across all digital channels. Remember, House of the Dragon that Pete was showing you, it’s an end-to-end journey that matters and that’s the way you actually win at this, looking at all touch points from your users and engaging people with disabilities in your design process where you can. Making sure that in that process for developing products, you’re making sure that you’re thinking about accessibility all the way through, and it differs depending on the type of product you’ve got. PDFs, websites, apps, they all have a subtle difference between them. Do you know what that is and can you get that in there?

But in summary, please try the Scorecard yourself. We would love to be able to discuss your specific results with you after you’ve done that, for you to go forward.