Accessibility in Software as a Service (SaaS):
why it’s essential for buyers and vendors

Pete: So today we are going to be looking at accessibility with software as a service, both for buyers and for builders. We’re going to be looking at some questions from these two perspectives.

We’ve kindly got four people with four different perspectives to join us as guests today. So let me just bring those people up. If you want to take yourselves off mute and introduce yourself. So Suraj, just tell us briefly a little bit about who you are and your passion around accessibility.

Sure: Yeah. Thanks, Peter. Hi everyone. I’m Suraj. I’m Jadu’s Chief Executive and Founder. Jadu is a digital platform provider. We provide web content management, CRM, online forms, and payment software for primarily local government but also higher education. We’re global. We’ve got about 100 local authorities in the UK that use Jadu. We’ve got just over 80 in Australia and we’ve got about 50 big institutions in the US that use Jadu for portal and forms and that sort of thing.

We are on a mission to become the world’s most accessible digital platform. That’s something that we sort of set ourselves at the end of last year. But that’s the beginning from having done a 20-year journey on being fanatical about accessibility. I’d like to take all the credit for that. Unfortunately, that would be a lie. It’s the people who work at Jadu who build value for our customers that have been so passionate about accessibility so much so that it’s baked itself into our culture and now everything we build has to pass a certain standard for us to let it out of the door.

Pete: Brilliant. Thank you. Lisa, tell us about yourself and HSBC and what you’re up to there.

Lisa: So yes. So I am one of the digital governance managers within HSBC. The accessibility team for HSBC sits within brand, which seems quite odd on the face of it. We are the only technology team that sits within brand. However, what that means is accessibility is intrinsic to our brand. It’s one of our core values and it is in everything that we deliver to our customers, to our staff, to all of our com.

We have a strategy to be the world’s most digitally accessible bank. We are an international bank in some very big markets and yeah, we’re on a transformation to reach that strategy.

Pete: Brilliant. Thank you. And Denise, tell me about PwC.

Denise: So I’m Denise Wood. I lead digital accessibility for PwC UK. So that means that myself and my team go out to our product managers, our agile delivery managers, all of our colleagues that procure technology and provision that across the firm to talk about accessibility standards, to upskill people with digital accessibility skills so they can go out and have competent conversations about disability, inclusion, and digital accessibility in general.

Pete: Brilliant. And Eamon, tell us about what you’re up to.

Good morning. Good afternoon all. Eamon McErlean. I’m VP and Global Head Accessibility in ServiceNow. Peter, I love the picture that you picked for me. I think that picture is about 7-8 years old. It’s just that time frame when we start to age significantly. So I appreciate that.

I joined ServiceNow about a year and a half ago. And ultimately, we are a platform company with just over 10,000 customers. The one thing I’ll say just to kick things off is we’ve been fortunate enough at ServiceNow to treat accessibility as a product. To categorise it as a product isn’t that easy to do, but we won that battle when I came on board and that enables us to allocate the applicable capacity, funding resources, and prioritisation of future roadmaps, which has made a huge difference to our progress. But looking forward to meeting everybody in the forum and I appreciate the invite.

Pete: Brilliant. Thank you. My name’s Pete Bricknell. I am the Chief Product Officer at Hassell Inclusion. My space here is to help organisations build their organisational maturity around accessibility, particularly against the international standard on digital accessibility.

Let us just look at our agenda. What we’re going to do is I’m going to spend a few minutes just talking about why does accessibility matter for software as a service. And then we’ll start opening up the conversation to our guests. Take the buyer’s perspective with a few questions and the vendor’s perspective and then what can you do about it? If you have questions that you want to raise as we go along, please put them in the chat, and Jonathan might interrupt if there’s something particularly pertinent, or we will take some of the key ones at the end of the conversation.

So why should we care about accessibility in software as a service? Well, one thing is a lot of organisations, when they buy software, buy work from digital agencies, marketing agencies, freelancers, contractors and tools, they’re not thinking about accessibility and procurement. In fact, when we look at the 300 or so organisations that have done our scorecard so far, 37% said that they don’t embed accessibility as a requirement in procurement. And that means you have risks down the line that what you’ve bought may not serve your customers, may not serve your employees. And a very few of those organisations, 6% always check that the suppliers are trained in digital accessibility. What might that mean? Well, actually, this affects a lot of different components within an organisation.

So you’ve got digital agencies. I used to work for Deloitte and Hitachi, great organisations, and some of you on the call may work for digital agencies. You’re building sites, you’re building apps, you’re running social media. You may well be just building a landing page for a campaign, or taking products and configuring them for clients. All of those need to think about accessibility, and if the team isn’t trained in it, you may well get the frustration of every release you have to refix it.

You’ve got contractors, some organisations are actually totally dependent on some really skilled people. Then you’ve got core solutions such as human resources, content management systems, your e-commerce systems. Do those work or do they discourage users from taking and doing what they need to do? And then even in the products that you may sell or your products that you use internally, do those components include accessibility. So payment systems, event booking. If you’re running a big conference, can people actually register if they have a disability? Mapping and planning logistics. So many organisations are dependent on the logistics provider to go and do the tracking. Are those tools accessible or are those for people who have an accessibility need? They can’t actually track and trace where there packages are.

And then there’s white labelled products. We actually do quite a lot of work looking at recruitment products and training products. And there’s far too many out there that are not accessible. Which means a corporation that prides itself on caring about the inclusion of its employees then has a big gap that people can’t get trained or you accidentally make it difficult for some people to get a job with you.

So all of these things are part of thinking about accessibility, and if we’re not getting it right, we might be missing up to 20% of our population. In the mass market world, typically it is 15-20% of the population have an accessibility need. In America, in the UK, it’s more like 20% and it increases as people get older. When you think about marketing, is the marketing going to reach everybody? If you’re thinking about your customers, are your customers going to be reached? Some organisations do work with general consumers, others have specific customers. But you can never assume that somebody doesn’t have a need and many people don’t see themselves as disabled, which is why I talk about an accessibility need. But actually would appreciate larger fonts, clearer diagrams.

So we’re thinking about all those needs such as vision, hearing, motor needs where somebody might struggle with a mouse and use a keyboard only. Also people who have dyslexia or are on the autistic spectrum, they may want resources that work well for them. If you get these things aren’t working, they can’t receive your communication, the communication isn’t clear. I have friends of mine who have dyslexia and they struggle with a lot of communication or passwords. They don’t buy 70% of the people who have disability, if they have a bad experience on buying something on your website, they won’t come back again.

So there’s a whole bunch of reasons why you want to make sure this works. The three big questions to look at where you’re sitting in the procurement process. I’ve put up here a diagram of a typical procurement process from thinking about you need to buy something, getting the business case with your bosses, work out the requirements, test the vendors, decide which one you’re going to contract with, and make sure the contract works.

So the three things to remember are thinking about including accessibility requirements of the key documents, such as the RFP, or the requirements, checking that your suppliers are competent at delivering, and check that they have given you what you paid for and we’ve had clients come to us and say, we don’t think our site is accessible. But the contract says the vendor should have delivered it. Then when we talk to the vendor, there’s a lot of embarrassment and we had a negotiation, a conversation about how to get this right. So if you’re a vendor, you want to get this right because it costs you if you don’t.

For a buyer, you want to get this right and you don’t want to have to pay for the fixes. So we see there’s five key questions to ask around accessibility and buying items. First thing, can I like trust your tool now? Can you demonstrate that you understand accessibility? There’s compliance reports, examples. There’s a thing called a VPAT, which is the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template, where you say, you know it works and you know where there’s gaps and you know where there’s workarounds. That’s one part of asking the question.

The second one is, what proof do I have in your process for delivering accessibility or showing us a roadmap? Particular roadmap. We’ve worked with one vendor that we are using, they’re great. But what we found was the developer fixed things for us and then the next release, they hadn’t thought about the fixes again. You don’t want to be in that place. The second group of questions is, can I trust you in the future? How are you going to keep the accessible with new versions and new features? Do you have proof in your processes, such as following the ISO standard, that you know that you’re going to keep it in there that when you do new features, they’ve thought about accessibility.

Then the third question is a buyer is what happens if you fail. If you cannot deliver accessibility in this release what will you do to make it okay for us and for our users? Are their workarounds? So as a vendor, you need to be thinking about that too. If it doesn’t quite work, what’s your workaround to help the customer and make sure it’s not too onerous. Hopefully, that gives you a view of five pre questions to ask. We do have a poster and we do have a page on our website. One of our team can just put that into the link, which gives you a reminder of those five questions. That’s our perspective.

Let’s bring our team in here and hear what their perspective is. So from a buyer’s perspective. Denise, I wonder if you can start by sharing, how have you engaged your vendors, your SaaS providers, and others in your accessibility journey and what’s been their reaction so far?

Denise: Thanks Peter. Thanks for having me today and I loved that five point slide can I please have a copy?

Pete: Absolutely.

Denise: I think you don’t need the rest of the panel, we could just talk about that slide. So how have we engaged with our vendors in our accessibility journey and what’s been the reaction? It’s the conversation, so transparency. Having a conversation about digital accessibility and understanding where we both are as a vendor and a buyer in that accessibility space. With our vendors we’ve been asking within our request for procurement process, the RFP process that you have in your keypoint slide, we’ve been asking the questions, how do you conform to the WCAG Version 2.1 AA standards?

It’s asking that open question, do you conform? If you don’t, where are your barriers as you have said? What might we need to put in place if we continue with you as a vendor to assist our colleagues in case they have a barrier with the technology we’re going to procure, but what is on your roadmap to fix those barriers? What’s your roadmap? So we’ve been asking, do you have an accessibility statement or do you have a roadmap, or do you have that Voluntary Product Accessibility Template that you mentioned as well? The VPAT, which is more American based, but is creeping into the UK market as well.

So we have really just been having that open conversation. We’ve had some interesting reactions. So when we’ve been working with a more mature, larger vendors, they are sometimes at the same pace or a little bit ahead of us. So they can provide those answers and those documentations. But when we’ve been working with the small startups, they’re interested in this conversation, but they may not have actually even considered it and we’ve worked with small startups in the past to have that conversation and not discount them as a vendor. If we want our market to open up in a technology environment, we need to take our small startups on that journey so they thrive for the future as well, and so that they can do good for their customers.

So it’s a two way relationship at the moment, and it has generally been met with positive reaction, and let’s do this together.

Pete: Let’s do this together, okay Lisa what’s been your experience with HSBC?

Lisa: We are I’d say quite far down the maturity level from a procurement perspective. Over the last 18 months, we have worked really hard with our global procurement team and beginning to work with our legal team now. For every single technology RFP that now comes out of HSBC, we request feedback and we’ve got some very stringent questions around accessibility, but also design and brand alignment.

Our whole premise around our design system and our brand standards is all around inclusive design. We’re bringing in the design and the accessibility right from the very beginning of that conversation. I think also with vendors especially within an organisation like HSBC being such an international bank, we have lots of legacy applications and legacy vendors that we deal with that are going through upgrades, some of them still very waterfall yearly upgrades, some of them going through the Agile process.

So we have varying degrees of maturity in some of our projects depending on the vendor. And I think the legacy applications, those conversations generally seem to be a little bit harder and I think that is largely driven by the fact that contractually from a procurement perspective, we haven’t asked them to do it before. So as Denise was saying, there’s lots of open conversations and negotiations and what we ask from our vendors is to try and understand our strategy and why we are pushing this agenda so hard as part of our brand. And again, the whole premise around we want it to be a partnership. It’s not a case of HSBC coming in and banging the drum saying this is what we expect and this is what we want you to do, we really want to work with our vendors in partnership and I think we’ve been doing that quite well. We offer a lot of training around accessibility, we want to share our knowledge to hopefully benefit all.

Pete: You’ve been training your vendors as well and understanding accessibility?

Lisa: Yeah, absolutely. So obviously, that’s going to make changes to the core platform which will ultimately benefit their other customers. But we’re not just in it for HSBC, we’re doing the right thing for the best.

Denise: I just think what Lisa has just said there as well around HSBC are having conversations with their vendors. PwC are having conversations with their vendors, the more of the corporates that start to have this conversation or bring it to the table with vendors, the more that they are then going to start cooperating and road-mapping this onto their product development, because they’re being asked for it continually.

Pete: It’s interesting. I was talking with a category of organisations and I’m not going to embarrass them. They basically said well, our customers don’t ask for it, so we don’t think about accessibility in what we build. And so if you are in a place of procuring, working with your procurement department to ask for it sets that expectation. And we’ve actually worked with a number of organisations who buy services, who are often disappointed that particularly bespoke building type organisations aren’t thinking about this as much as they are. So yes, if you guys are telling the market, the market will change. Eamon, is there anything you want to add from your perspective working with vendors?

Eamon: There’s a couple of points that Denise and Lisa mentioned that relates to sharing. I’ve been fortunate enough to work in the accessibility arena for about 78 years now. I can honestly say, compared to any other discipline, or category, or product, whatever you want to call it, there’s no other area that’s as open as transparent, and inclusive, and sharing as accessibility. We share our best practises.

We will openly share our road-map. We’ll share lessons learned from working with phenomenal vendors and maybe vendors that have opportunities, and on that note we’ve also created what we call a PAC, Product Advisory Council, where we invite all of our customers to join us on a quarterly basis where we share everything I just mentioned. In regards to where are we out with embedding automation, where are we are with up levelling, embedding accessibility into the entire FDLC. Where are we are with training, and where we are with customer engagement. And then share a roadmap for the next two or three years. So I think that collaborative mindset goes a long way overall, but this isn’t scripted. But honestly, we are a relatively small team. In ServiceNow we’re a team of eight core team members that COE expands significantly more than that.

But to give us the scalability we need, it’s working with vendors like yourselves to be very honest with you, like Hassell, who can give us that scalability across multiple areas. Including work with our procurement team as you’re doing now to embed accessibility in the RFP, ensuring we’re doing their columns in the scalable fashion and there’s multiple, multiple arenas but it never hurts, and it enables scalability, when you do partner with the right vendor.

Pete: Right so we’ve talked about: what’s the reaction? What would you wish your vendors would do? Maybe there’s one thing that you’re seeing, at least from your perspective at HSBC. If there’s one thing you could ask your vendors to consider, what would that be?

Lisa: I would ask around prioritisation, I think. I was listening to Denise and the first question, again, I’ve seen contradictory conversations depending on the size of the organisation. And this comes back down to the roadmap. We’ve worked with very big organisations and very big vendors that have got accessibility on the roadmap but it could be three to five years. Our influence to change that is very difficult. Then I’ve had smaller organisations that have not thought about it, have no idea what we talk about when we mentioned accessibility. But then are just so open to great, we can learn something else. This is going to better our product.

I think that thing around the one thing I’d wish from our vendors is being able to be flexible around the prioritisation of this type of development. Some vendors or technology teams may not see it as a feature enhancement or a product feature, but ultimately it is here, like I said, to benefit the greater good. Prioritisation I think is really key.

Pete: Denise, what would you want to see?

Denise: There’s a couple of things I think one is, are we asking the right questions as a buyer? What are we not asking you that we should be? How do you want us to report your accessibility barriers? As Lisa was mentioned in legacy systems, how do you want us as your current clients or potential clients, how do you want us to report the accessibility barriers that we see? Do you have a portal? Do you want those quarterly meetings that Eamon mentioned?

Then one of the other things that I’ve been thinking about was customisation. How do you want us to not customise your product? Or can you take us on a customisation journey so when we buy your accessible product that works out of the box and we then put our brand, our workflows, etc, across your product. How do we know that we aren’t going to break that we need education, we need upskilling. Do we need that in our contracts? Do we actually need to tighten up our contracts to say out of the box this works when we customise it, we’ll help you fix it you but actually you need to do XY and Z. Educate, look at your branding too in order to keep it accessible. So I think that’s a really key two way relationship there.

Eamon: Peter, you mind if I just jump in there for a second.

Denise: No, please do.

Eamon: Such a great call. We had our annual conference last week in Vegas knowledge and it was a light bulb moment that hit me and it was completely ignorant and stupidity and naivety on my part even though I’ve been doing this for a while. We were so focused on training our key members, making sure our procurement team, when they were onboarding new vendors, that we levelled up the accessibility, skill sets, and requirements. But the one gap that I wasn’t really focusing on was our third party vendors that are doing additional development work and customisation work to our portals. And their importance is, you know, the benefit is they’re dynamic, the painful piece is they’re dynamic, so it hurts in both ways. But now what we’re starting to kick off is sharing our best practises or guidelines. And hopefully we’re working to be able to share our actual training that we’ve created with those third party vendors that are doing that customised development work to ensure that they remain within the guardrails that we’ve developed.

Denise: I think, Peter, one other point crossing, it’s great that Eamon, you’ve had the light bulb moment and I couldn’t make Vegas but I hope it was a good conference. The other thing I was going to say was around, I’ve just forgotten it actually so come back to me. I’ve had that moment of memory. I’ve remembered, apologies. The technology as vendors when you’re dealing with procurement teams within our organisations ask the procurement team, are they connected to the technology teams? Are we actually having internal conversations? So, you know, I meet regularly with my procurement team. Lisa’s already said that they do the same. If you have a disconnected vendor or buyer, ask them that tough question. When are you as a procurement team talking to your technology teams so that they can be talking about digital accessibility internally as well?

Pete: Great, there’s a question in the chat, which is an organisation asks for the public roadmap for accessibility. It’s something we ask for. Under French law if your organisation is over a certain revenue size, which is about €250,000,000 you need to publish a three year accessibility plan in France. Therefore, any multinational is probably over that number in France, and so you might as well just get it right for the whole organisation rather than kind of fixing something just so you’re legal in France.

The other side of it is we do notice a number of multinationals who are breaking the French law by not having that on their website. So if you are a large corporation, either as a buyer or a seller, get that roadmap in place, publish it, and you’ll meet the French law and it’s helpful for everybody. So we’ve kind of looked at the buyers perspective, so now we’re going to look at the vendors perspective. And so I’m going to start with Eamon. How did you get that senior leadership attention or how did your team get the senior leadership attention to make accessibility a proper programme in the organisation?

Eamon: I’ve approached it through, fortunately, being able to help kick it off at Apple and then Nike and ServiceNow. There’s always three areas that I help justify and the first one and will always remain the first one, it’s the right thing to do, we know it’s the right thing to do. Unfortunately, the right thing to do doesn’t necessarily increase your revenue in a major risk degree. So I quickly follow up the right thing to do by it can be in certain areas, a legal requirement and if not a legal requirement, definitely a huge PR risk. Dominos being a perfect example. And if I also mention when pitching for increased funds or increased revenue, increased resources. It’s not the cost of the lawsuit that will ever hurt a company. It’s the PR and the fallout of having that kind of black label against you or black mark against you.

But lastly and third, and this is honestly, it helps as much as anything, as anything else is accessibility if done properly can create a competitive advantage even and we’re seeing that now, especially in the public sector, for RFPs as we know, accessiblity in the public sector is transitioning from a nice to have to a must have. So there’s many of our competitors that can’t really compete in certain areas with certain entities due to the fact that they are not to the conformance or usability level that they need to be. So them three combines the right thing to do from a conformance legal perspective and then from a competitive advantage like that goes a long way.

Pete: Great. Suraj what happened with your organisation because you kicked it off and now the accessibility is core. What happened there?

Suraj: Well, first and foremost, our first customers were in the public sector in the UK, and local government gets really beaten up all the time. But one thing I can tell you having worked alongside people in local government for 22 years, is that there are some amazingly, just like the whole accessibility community that we meet every day is so passionate, like everyone in this room really understands the challenges.

Yeah, I mean, it was a requirement of early days when we were writing first lines of code. But, it was one moment when our head of design, Lee, was sat next to me. There was only three people in the company. It was him, it was myself, and it was Andy who was our engineer. He turned around to me and said, “We can’t keep building websites in tables. You know what? I would have happily have built the whole world in tables, nested them 50,000 times.” And I said, “What else do we do?” He said, “Well, let’s make the first local authority website ever using CSS you know.” And I suppose since I shrugged and said, “Okay, you know, go ahead and do it.” Kettering Borough Council, back in 2002, was the first local authority to ever have a fully CSS web standards compliant website. Didn’t work in all browsers, but you know what? Kettering didn’t care. And it kicked off a whole revolution.

But, that moment then has led to many moments like that where it’s not me as the CEO or the founder of the company who said, we’re going to be accessible and we’re going to make sure accessibility is prioritised, it’s been the people and the noise is so loud that someone like me just cannot not hear it. And I also recognise and when I’m speaking to others, chief executives and local authorities, you can recognise when someone really understands what you’re saying, and the same goes for our partners too and even just people we speak to. You also recognise it when it goes through one ear and out the other. You know, and that is what fascinates me the most, is why wouldn’t you prioritise accessibility? Because for me, it’s just like a no brainer just like Eamon says. I think now it’s going to be the competitive advantage.

I really believe that there’s got to be a top down moment where CEOs C-suite really are educated to understand what the challenges are. I suppose, you know, there was that one moment when, you know, our designer turned around and said let’s just do this properly, and then there was a second moment when I saw somebody who was blind actually use our product. You know, I’ve never been able to turn away from that moment and so it’s baked into culture now at Jadu.

Pete: That’s a really interesting thing. Quite often, we do what we call speed dating, where we bring people with accessibility needs into an organisation. There’s one organisation, we did that with, a year later, we were looking at the ISO standard. And time and time again we met people who said, I remember a year ago about that workshop, and that really affected me because I now understood how hard it is to use our resources. And then it just was theoretical until I saw somebody with those needs.

Eamon: What we’re trying to do in our site is create awareness forums, so have individuals that different disabilities go to different offices and just sit with team members, and show them how to use a screen reader. Show them their daily experience. As we wrapped up the pack last week and it was a large audience and somebody was saying, what would you suggest the next steps? But if I had one wish for everybody as it relates to accessibility, is spend 30 minutes or an hour with a team member that has a disability. And just sit with them for an hour. I promise you you will think differently about accessibility and you will prioritise it differently as well.

Jonathan: Eamon, can I come in on that one? Because I think actually that’s kind of at the heart of it, which is that spending 30 minutes with a team member with a disability requires organisations actually recruiting people with disabilities. Actually, that’s at the heart of everything that we’re talking about here in the sense that if you have team members with disabilities, you then become aware that the tools that they need to be accessible.

I know my experience from HSBC and PwC, it’s that awareness that accessibility isn’t just about our customers, it’s about our staff that kind of kicks off this sort of thing. So I want to underline what you said there, Eamon, because the fact that you’re saying spend 30 minutes with a team member with a disability means you’re already getting something right in that you’re valuing disability as actually a helpful aspect of people that you recruit.

Lisa, how’s that kind of worked at HSBC?

Lisa: Yeah, I was thinking. So we have quite a big user research programme on top of everything else that we do. The user research, we take kind of big products from a customer and a staff perspective. So learning but has been a big one on the staff side through user research, availability, ERG. And we have had instances where that has maybe not a technical accessibility defect but a usability defect. And we have changed the experience to make that better.

I think a key thing that we’ve done on our mandatory learning is to create a full accessibility mode there that anybody can use, it’s not just for people with accessibility needs. But again, it’s bridging that gap between technical accessibility and usability. But also from a recruitment perspective, you know, we’ve got a raft of initiatives ongoing outside of just the accessibility team, including the wider D&I agenda. But, the point is that we’re all integrated to get to the right outcome. Yeah, the recruitment of people who are with either disabilities or neuro diverse is top on the agenda for HSBC.

Pete: Great. Eamon maybe you can share a little bit about what you’re doing to get accessibility into your products, and then Suraj can share what you’re doing at Jadu.

Eamon: Yeah, I’ll try to be brief because I don’t want to monopolise. Again, from lessons learned in my previous role, what I was focusing on was resolving the customer issues and ensuring that we built that collaboration with our customers for continued growth and continued success. But, what I realised was unless you embed accessibility into the product development life cycle or software development life cycle, preferably the PDLC, you’re not going to win long term. All you’re doing in that first instance is just resolving issues, is just putting out the fires, but you’re not resolving it.

So what we’re doing at ServiceNow is right from the requirement stage, requirement specifications, any new designs. We’re bringing in individuals with disabilities to look at the new designs and feature functionality from what’s called an insights forum. Training up tests, training up engineers, developing engineers into their skill sets awareness, developers, testers, project managers, programme managers, so truly trying to embed the necessary steps and necessary validations of accessibility throughout the entire PDLT. It’s a progress, it is a process. It will take a while, but we are already starting to see winds. And once we do that, we have to stop thinking about accessibility as an add on. It’s not an add on, it should be the same as performance or security or anything else that was considered maybe an add on years ago. That’s our goal. Whenever we stop thinking about add on, then we know that we’re doing the right thing.

Pete: And at Jadu what are you up to with embedding accessibility in the product?

Suraj: Well, we’ve done a few things. The first thing is we have a head of accessibility who is a former developer, but also very passionate about the cause, and he speaks with not just experience but also a deep understanding not just, you know, what WCAG is tells us to do, but also on how the product is actually used.

The first big thing that we did, I think the first big move that we made, was about three years ago when we wrote accessibility into everyone’s objectives. So we use OKRs at Jadu and lots of technology companies use OKRs, the OKR process. And so it’s baked into everybody’s objectives and that makes it a mission for everyone. We’re all measured by our objectives on a quarterly and an annual basis.

The second thing we did most recently was we made it our mission, and we’re launching this in July, to become the world’s most accessible digital platform, and I think we can only do that because we’ve been so fanatical about it. But it’s that baking of it into everyday culture, and just to Eamon’s point. I love that you see accessibility as a product. At Jadu because the outcome of what we do is so public, it’s websites, it’s apps, and it’s what the public use for public services. Accessibility for us is the product. And so every time we see someone use our software, who is blind or across a broad range of disabilities, we learn something new, and it’s an epiphany moment, the changes we need to make. And you know what? Accessibility is pretty hard when you’re making software. It’s got to be written into every line of code, isn’t it? So baking it into culture, that’s the thing that we did. We made everyone’s objective.

Pete: Great.

Lisa: Can I just add one more final point on that? I’m so sorry. Taking it away slightly from the shinier stuff around, like I use the research programme. We also have, as you can imagine, as a bank, a very stringent governance process. What that means is that for every digital application or experience, especially on the customer side, and we’re rolling it out, part of our transformation on the staff side have to come through our team, which will mean it will be audited from an accessibility perspective. So we aim that any experience comes to us, and it will not go out the door unless it’s got our accessibility stamp on it. So not quite as exciting as talking about collaboration, experience, and user research. But we are there a little bit with the whole current stick piece.

Suraj: I love that. I think that’s like having it in your definition of done, isn’t it?

Lisa: It’s exactly that, and that’s how we try and get it across to our developers, yeah.

Jonathan: Lisa, just on that one. You’re not doing this on a few tools, are you?

Lisa: No.

Jonathan: Can you give us an idea of the scope of how many vendors you’re working with?

Lisa: On this, I look after the staff specifically, and probably 95% of the projects that we have are working with vendors and SaaS-provided solutions. I think on our list, we’ve got about 250 individual projects. On the customer side, I’m sure we’re nearly at the 3,000 project mark that go through our process. Quite a lot. So busy.

Jonathan: So how do you prioritise between those?

Lisa: Between the projects?

Jonathan: Yeah.

Lisa: Honestly, there’s no priority. They’re all treated the same. If it’s regulatory, that may get pushed through slightly quicker. But ultimately regardless, if you’re a big or small application, it will go through our process. Not every product owner loves that, but that’s how we manage it.

Pete: Great.

Denise: I know you just changed slides, but I think one of the things for maybe some of the people that are on their early journey here is investment. So the investment of testing tools for your product teams, for your developer teams, and your testing teams to upskill themselves in how do they audit the products that they’re either building or procuring as well? So I think it depends where you are on that journey as well. It does start with that investment piece. It starts with your accessibility testing tools. It starts with upskilling, and it starts with that embedding it across your organisation as one of your goals, as we’ve all mentioned. We’ve got an inclusion, a five-step inclusion plan in PwC, and we’ve a global five-step inclusion plan that all of our territory firms then hang off and hook into their own five-step inclusion plan for each territory.

Pete: Great. So, from the vendor perspective, what would you ask of your buyers? What’s the one thing you would like to see better from them? Start with Suraj.

Suraj: I think that senior-level buy-in has got to be there, really. If you’re going to take accessibility seriously, it’s got to be a top-down thing. But aside from that, ownership, and it comes back to what Denise was saying about being a smarter customer. One of the biggest, I suppose, obstacles in what we do is you get measured. You get measured in league tables like Silktide have one as well. We’re partnered both with Sitemorse and Silktide with integrations to their accessibility testing tools. But there are these league tables where organisations benchmark themselves, and it’s competitive in that respect. It’s like PDFs, they are the bane of everyone’s lives. There’s probably no point in discussing it much further other than saying that. So rather than moan about it, we did moan about it for a long time. But then because our software allows you to upload a PDF for people to download, and if that PDF isn’t accessible, what do you do? The software can’t really change the PDF. So we’ve started doing training courses for our customers to learn how to make more accessible PDFs.

And that’s kind of taken the edge off it a little bit. But I do think that education piece is important which is why I think what you’re doing at Hassell but also all the other organisation’s ability net is sort of the shore trust. You know, it’s customers having access to that knowledge, and that guidance I think is the thing because a lot of them just aren’t aware that it’s not expensive to educate yourselves for better accessibility.

Pete: Great. Eamon, what would you like to see from buyers?

Eamon: I think if they could prioritise accessibility the same way as they prioritise security or anything else within the agreements, like some of our agreements are mostly through MSAs, and MSAs can get renewed annually, three years, five years. And I don’t want to sound repetitive, but it goes back to that knowledge, that empathy level, because if you have a buyer that really knows about accessibility, has spent some time with people, understands the true impact they will be a lot more in tune and prioritise ensuring accessibility is in there than somebody that doesn’t know much about it and that’s just the truth.

Pete: To build on your point, Eamon, one of the things we notice is people who think accessibility is binary, are you accessible or are you not accessible? That’s the wrong question.

It’s like saying, can you play the piano or not to play the piano. Well, actually, concert pianist and Grade 1 is very different. So I would love to see buyers, not just go for the yes/no, but tell us how and why and where the gaps are.

Eamon: And honestly that’s one of the things I’d love to get out of forums like this. How can we trigger that empathy? What’s the best way for us to communicate to our organisations? The impact accessibility can really have on individuals and ultimately organisations. But we can trigger that. We can hit that sweet spot for the empathy button. I think that’s golden.

Suraj: Can I just say we had a chat called Addie Latif, who’s amazing, just Google his name. I’ll post in the chat later. There’s lots of videos. We had him speak as well as Hassell, We had him speak at our internal conference at the end of last year. He spoke for a few minutes and then demoed.

He was dialled in over Teams, shared his iPhone with us and showed us the experience he had trying to access. He was trying to book a flight and he used a number of applications and in the end, he just couldn’t book a flight.

Aside from the fact that he had half of us in tears from his story, that was such a powerful message. I didn’t have to say anything about why accessibility was baked into everyone’s objectives and why they had to learn because they could see it for themselves. I think if any one of us can achieve it, if you can get somebody who has a disability to actually show the rest of the organisation either on video or via Teams or something, how they’re using your product, I think that is so powerful.

Pete: Great. Well, I think that takes us to the so what now? Let me share two views of what you may be considering. If you are sitting as a buyer, what might you be considering that you need to do?

One part, and we’ve heard several times is get accessibility into procurement. We run procurement policy workshops and help organisations think about the contracts, think about where they put it in. It’s often a hard piece of work because procurement don’t necessarily see it’s their bailiwick, it’s their space, but actually they have a lot of influence on what happens later. Make sure you know what apps you’ve got and prioritise which ones matter, which have the biggest impact around accessibility, which has the biggest risk and start thinking about testing those out and seeing where your gaps are around accessibility. Will that mean you need to change some of your core components, go back to your vendors, go back to your current contracts and have that conversation, which Denise and Lisa were saying and help them with the roadmap.

Lisa was talking about working with organisations for them I’d call go great. Basically, what’s your roadmap and how are they going to fix themselves? We work with vendors on that, it doesn’t necessarily mean if you’re a buyer, you have to fix it for them but at least they are now accountable to you, and then tell the world of your progress.

There’s great stuff being done if you tell the world that you are making these changes. It encourages other vendors to know that they’ve got to get it right if they want to bid with you. Then if you’re producing a software as a service, a good starting point is just to look at your product and your organisational maturity. We talked about not just getting the product right to fix the customer issue, but you’ve got to go down to the component level and the core of your products so that the future is always accessible.

We help organisations think about their policies, governance, etc, against the ISO standard as well as you can have those testing tools to match the WCAG standards, and then build your own go great plan. Make sure you’re delivering those product fixes as you go and at the same time build the capability in governance so that it’s going to be right in the future and not just now, and then again tell the world of your status and progress.

We know that organisations like HSBC have been winning awards left, right, and centre this year because they’re telling the world about what they’re doing. It’s not really a blow your own trumpet, it’s actually blow the trumpet of accessibility because when people see this is happening and there’s press release and organisations are taking it seriously, that spreads elsewhere.

That really takes us down to probably we’ve got one minute for a key question. I don’t know, Jonathan, if there’s something in the chat that you would want to raise, and it’s probably going to be almost a quick fire question at the end of game show, which one of our guests who would like to respond to it? So Jonathan.

Jonathan: Yeah, I’m going to do this one. VPATs are often the kind of like the link between the vendor and the buyer. So the question came through, what if the vendor says “just read our VPATs”? I wanted to ask Lisa or Denise if a vendor says, just read our VPAT, how do you feel about that vendor?

Denise: Answer this we’ve got enough seconds left. It would cause me to ask questions about their commitment to digital accessibility and their own personal knowledge on that journey as well, and the roadmap that they do or don’t have and whether or not they’ve even got time for us as a buyer to sit down and have a proper conversation about digital accessibility. It would concern me.

Jonathan: Yeah, I think it would concern me too as well. Lisa, do you take that from your Vendors or do you go deeper?

Lisa: I mean, we’ll take it, but we will absolutely go deeper into right. It doesn’t change our process, doesn’t change what we look for, and the VPAT is not what we’d class as making sure your platform is accessible. We will get hands on and we will look at that code and we will check it for ourselves.

Jonathan: Great stuff, thank you. So just before we go, because we ended up on this thing, so everybody is saying it was Eamon’s message, you know, how do we trigger empathy? We’re talking about Adi… What we find, so Adi I know him really well and we absolutely adore him, but he’s just representative of people who are blind from our perspective Hassell Inclusion, we always like to give people an experience of people with different types of disabilities.

Pete’s already mentioned speed dating, which is one of the things that we do. You guys on our web and our community won’t have had that yet so we wanted to bring a flavour of that next month. We’re going to have two people with disabilities talking and you can actually ask questions via the chat of them about what digital means to them. We are not going to go blind actually, because people like Adi are out there doing great things. So we’re actually going to be looking at some of the disabilities that people tend to forget a little bit, but doing that in a way that really brings them to life to people. So if you want to understand things from the perspective of people with disabilities and want to ask questions this time actually, I think it’s the 15 June. Yeah, thanks Pete there on the screen, there will be a real opportunity to do that here for free on digital accessibility experts live.

I wanted to say thank you to Pete and all of our four panel participants. I can’t think of an hour that I’ve actually enjoyed more over the last few months. It is so great to actually get sort of like vendors and buyers together. We massively respect all four of you who have been on here. We think you are real sort of like best practise in what each of you do and it’s been great to hear that to and fro between you.

We haven’t had time to answer all of the questions that people have asked. You know, someone asked about artificial intelligence, ask Eamon that because I know he’s doing some really great stuff. You know, ask HSBC about how to do this at scale, ask PwC about all of the things they’re doing to try and make sure that accessibility for staff is going really well. Ask Suraj about how content management systems and platforms can really work. Those are the sorts of things that we hope we’ve been able to bring you if you have more questions, if folks on the call are happy for people to email you directly, really happy for you to sort of put that into the chat, I know Eamons’ done that already.

Thank you so much everybody for your time today. I hope that’s been of really great help to everybody. Yeah, look forward to actually these conversations continuing, that’s the key thing. I think we’ve started some good things here and I always thought that if we could bring the right people together, great things will happen. I think we’ve done that today so I look forward to seeing what happens. Thanks everyone.

Thank you very much, have a wonderful weekend.