6 years from a "ridiculous idea" to an award Hassell Inclusion wins Outstanding Digital Inclusion Project at Digital Technology Leaders Awards 2026

I’m lucky enough to have been to quite a few awards ceremonies over the years.

One thing I always do is try to record the countdown to the winner being announced. It’s a nice thing to send on to our client when they win.

Last night at the Computing Digital Technology Leaders Awards 2026, for the first time I was there in the room when Hassell Inclusion won. I did the same thing and filmed the countdown. The first word out of my mouth when the winner was announced was “unbelievable.”

I was genuinely shocked. Not because we didn’t deserve to win. But because the competition was so strong.

The company we were keeping

The Outstanding Digital Inclusion Project category at the Digital Technology Leaders Awards had nine finalists.

Among them were:

• IBM
• the Bank of England (who won it last year),
• Camden Learning (backed by Google with a campus that the Prime Minister visited at launch),
• Hull College (whose project had already received a Queen Elizabeth Prize for Education from The King and Queen), and
• Three (whose Discovery programme has reached 25,000 people nationwide with major corporate funding behind it).

We’re a 20-person consultancy. We fund everything ourselves. How could we compete with that?

But we did.

And we won.

A “ridiculous” idea

The reason this win makes me so proud is that I pitched this idea to the team just as we’d gone into lockdown in 2020. I have a sort of framework for testing ideas: if it sounds completely ridiculous at first, it might actually be obvious.

Why would we give all our expert knowledge away for free in monthly webinars?

That sounded absolutely ridiculous.

But when you think about it, it was actually really obvious.

At that moment, people needed accessibility more than ever. And there simply aren’t enough people in the world to get this done. So, creating an education programme that anybody, anywhere, can tap into and use for free became our mission.

After all, generosity has always been one of our values at Hassell Inclusion.

What we built

Our free monthly webinars have been running for over six years now.

Our CEO Jonathan hosts them, and we regularly get 300 or 350 people turning up live. When I first pitched the idea in 2020, we were hoping for 30.

We’ve now had over 7,400 live attendees from over 80 countries join us. And when you add in HiHub where all of our webinar recordings are available for free in our archive, and our podcasts of the webinars, over 20,000 people have used what we’ve created.

None of them have ever been asked to pay. And our webinars are never a teaser for sales. While they’re not all you can learn on a topic from our training, they cover key parts of what’s in our courses.

This doesn’t just happen on the fly. There’s a lot of planning behind every session. Every January we survey the community on the topics that matter most, and the calendar for the year is designed around what practitioners say they actually need. We get feedback after every session, and it feeds straight into what comes next. It’s a constant loop.

Each webinar also becomes a transcribed video recording, and podcast episode, which has been really valuable for people who can’t attend live. Over 13,000 downloads so far across more than 80 countries.

And earlier this year we added another layer: HiBot, a free AI accessibility maturity assistant trained on all of that content. You can ask it an accessibility question and get a reliable answer whenever you need one. You don’t have to wait for next month’s session to ask your question.

Why this matters

Winning this award validates all the hard work from every single person at Hassell Inclusion who touches these webinars every month. The people who research the topics, who handle the production, who do the marketing, who follow up afterwards. We couldn’t have everyone there on the night, as we wanted to invite people from the community who regularly attend our webinars to celebrate with us, but it takes a team to stand on that stage. As an organisation, we are incredibly proud of what we do, month in, month out.

I helped write the entry for this award, and the process itself was a bit of a moment for me. When you’re in it every month, you don’t always step back and see the full picture. But pulling together the numbers, the growth year on year, the reach across the world, the feedback from people who tell us these webinars have changed how they work, even helped them make their careers in accessibility, it hit me how much this programme has grown from that ridiculous idea in 2020.

That’s why we keep doing it. We may have been the people up for the award, but accessibility has always been a team effort. Our programme of webinars, podcasts and access to expert answers is our contribution to the individuals and teams doing this important work all around the world.

As for what’s next? I’ll be honest: as I was reflecting after we’d picked up the award, my brain was already on it. That’s just how I’m wired. I did soak it in. I really did reflect on how proud I am to be part of Hassell Inclusion. But I’m already working on another “ridiculous idea”, and I’ll be pitching it to the team shortly.

Watch this space…