How to Accelerate & Prioritise Your 12 month Accessibility Plan

Delighted to have people joining us for this Webinar today, wherever you are in the world, we are thinking about 2024 and what sorts of plans should you have for accessibility. So as Pete said we have got quite a number of people who have registered for this webinar and sometimes it takes a little while for people to arrive. So we’ll be starting in a couple of minutes time.

In the meantime, it would be really great if you could, Ruth started this already. Thank you Ruth Weaver, you are my favourite person at the moment. If you can pop in the Zoom chat if you like, who you are and where you are in the world. We don’t need to know where you work, anything like that. Just to keep this with a community feel if you like. Also, it helps you get used to using the meeting chat and because we have so many people on these webinars we mute you all, because otherwise if everyone is asking questions at the same time that would be really difficult. The best place to ask your questions and we really do value them, is in the chat. So thank you, we can already see, we have got actually quite a number of folks from the UK. That’s good. A number of people from London, Swindon, Liverpool. We’ve got one person already from Canada, another from Brussels, Newcastle is actually in the UK but if you ever go there the accent is amazing so you might feel like you’re in another country and that would go for Derbyshire, I can say that because I come from Derbyshire originally myself. It’s in the middle of the UK We have a number of people from Wales and Canada. From Edinburgh. I was there a few months ago, it’s a lovely place.  From Helsinki! So really great to have a lot of people joining us. Just a few things a bit of housekeeping before we plough on with the subject for today.

We are recording this session today as we always do. The reason we do that is to make these sessions available free for you afterwards. We have something called HiHub, you do need to register for it but it’s completely free, we just like to see who’s using it. And there are the video recordings with transcripts and captions of around about three and a half years worth of these sessions. So if you find something you like here, chances are there is more on HiHub and keep up skilling yourself in accessibility. That’s what this is all about, it’s us trying to make sure that if we have really useful expertise and skills that we’re able to bring that to you. Lots of people from all over the world. I can see some folks in West Sussex and Spain. So thank you so much for being with us today. We’re going to try and make it the best hour of your month from an accessibility perspective so I think it’s going to be a good session.

For those of you who prefer listening to things, I was at the top of HSBC Tower a couple of days ago at the Tech Share Pro Event and the number of people that came up to me to say we love your podcast. That’s the audio form of what we do on these webinars. So you can find loads of good stuff if you Search for digital accessibility experts podcast on where you normally get your podcast you will be able to get a lot of good things. So I’ll hand over to Pete now.

I am going to put a link in, we have a treat today. Because we’re looking at planning, we have taken some of the slides and we’re going to give you these slides in the chat. Of a couple of templates we’re going to use because you will probably say I want one of those, so rather than screenshotting and typing it out. I linked in the chat a link to a PowerPoint with a few slides. And you don’t have to open it at the same time if you want to focus. But it does give you some resources.

Thanks Pete. And a number of people saying nice things about the podcast on line and that’s good. We love recording these things and if you love listening that’s awesome. We have a lot of people coming on to here. We’re getting close to a hundred already and it maybe a lot more as everybody comes in. So we have muted you. If you would like to turn on your video it’s really nice we get to see people, so please don’t worry about children, dogs, anything in the background that’s all good. It’s one of the great things I think about life after the pandemic, we got to be a bit more human. So bring in more of ourselves to these things. So that’s great. The other thing, if you could, I don’t know what your Zoom name comes out like at the moment. Most of you have a Zoom name but if it’s something weird like iPhone, you could change it for the session that’s really good and A: if you ask a question we know who it’s coming from and B: The best question will get a free copy of one of my books and it’s very, very difficult to send books to somebody who asks a great question if we don’t know their name. So if you can do that, that’s good.

We do have quite a lot of chat that happens in the chat during these sessions. As Pete is presenting, he is doing most of the presenting today I am going to be answering questions in the chat but we have different people sharing things, with everybody, everybody is able to use the chat and that’s great. But if you do answer anyone’s question, then please be respectful, honouring and confidential. We like this to be a place where people can feel safe in asking the questions they want to ask about accessibility, however simple they might be. We have people on the call who probably have been doing accessibility for years. We probably have other people on the call who have been doing accessibility for a week. We want everybody to feel welcomed. So that’s great. We have live on screen captions, so turn on captions in Zoom and you will get those. We have also got a link that Liz just put in the chat and that will take you through if you want the captions in a different browser or with a different colour. So we’re recording this and sharing on HiHub. So lots of people ask can we have the slides, we don’t send the slides out but we enable you to got the whole experience and transcript.

So today we have myself, I am Jonathan Hassell and CEO of Hassell Inclusion and Pete Bricknell my right hand man when it comes to all things strategic and planning related, all of the work we are doing for lots of clients all over the world, So we are going to be presenting today and today, all about challenges with planning and why is planning so important for accessibility. And how can we help you do that. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about in the next bit. So you will start with me and I will hand over to Pete. And it’s my job to understand and to help you get across to you, what sort of planning we think is really effective when it comes to accessibility and most organisations have gone through this version one planning. And some organisations are still there and if that’s you that’s still fine but we’re going to go beyond this today. A lot of organisations think we need to plan for accessibility the goal is to get WCAG compliant. So get one product to compliant level. Normally that’s because they need to meet some sort of requirements, if they are in the public sector, for example PS bar in the UK or they don’t want to get sued. They know there is a law there and there is nothing wrong with that but we’re going take you a lot further in terms of planning. Because that’s really when you start, you maybe have one product that you are desperate to get to the finishing line. What we’re talking about here is there will be a lot of products in your organisation that you will need to get there.So at some point you will need to get a bit more strategic and organisational than just one product.

So I am going give you an example of what I mean by this. So say for example you were in France or Canada, you would actually be required to publish a three year plan by law. The accessible Canada act. And we have some people on the call who probably know this a lot deeper than we do but it’s not just about getting a product to accessibility as summed up in WCAG. It’s saying, you need to have a plan to do this in a consistent and sustainable way so those plans have policies, programmes, practices and services in it. It’s not just how good are we in terms of WCAG?

Closer to home here in the UK it’s France, so in France we have the RGAA 4.1 act, these are the regulations for accessibility in France. And public organisations and also private organisations who are larger than a turnover of 250 million euros annually, so that’s a lot of big companies. Yes, they must have accessible communications, they also must publish how close they are to WCAG 2.1 AA these are. But also they must draw up and publish a three year plan for making products and service accessible. It’s really important and one of the great things the French and Italians latched on to was, it’s not enough to say your product is 50% on the way to WCAG. People want to know where you are going today to improve and that’s the reason why they ask to you publish the plan. We’re all probably thinking about the deadline for the European Accessibility Act 2025 a couple of years away where the European accessibility act also includes a lot of private sector organisations like banks, travel, ecommerce. The interesting thing here is that most people equate EAA with we got to get to WCAG 2.1AA. But some of the countries in Europe may do what France and Italy did and say it’s not enough to say where you want to get to, you actually need to tell us how you think you are going to get there. And just to give you an idea of the sort of things we’re talking about and sorry there is a lot of text on this slide. But this is literally the text in that particular act translated into English. You can see some of the things that they in France think an accessibility plan needs to have in it.

An accessibility plan needs to be referenced in your digital plan in the organisation. It needs to have an accessibility reference which the rest of the world will call an accessibility lead. Somebody whose job makes accessibility happen in that organisation. They need to have the financial and human resources to be able to do it. So people to get things right, to test things for accessibility. They need to take accessibility in account when they are recruiting. Really interesting that the French are effectively saying if you are a French company and you want to do good websites, and they equate good with accessible then it’s really important to make sure when you are recruiting somebody who is a digital professional you ask them are they any good at this? If people aren’t to the level you need in terms of their training that needs to be provided as well. External resources and expertise, that’s companies like ours. Technical means and tools that automated tools and systems like that. Procedures for controlling digital services.

Mechanisms for handling user requests when people say your product isn’t accessible enough, and actually getting this stuff into contracts where the people who are creating things for you are not actually in house but through a supplier or vendor. And even things like, compliance includes including people with disabilities and user testing. And not just if you like doing the audit tests but also making the corrective measures to actually take your product from where ever it is in terms of the audit. Whether it’s 60% compliant or whatever and actually making fixes, these are the sorts of things that in France they consider an accessibility plan needs to have in it.

So, that might feel a bit different from where you are at the moment. And the key thing is, you may have a written down accessibility plan, but even if you haven’t you will be doing something with accessibility and that will be your plan at the moment. Even if it’s three people who are really keen on accessibility and who are trying to make something happen. Whatever it is, it’s a useful thing to look at where you are at the moment. And our score card is a free way of allowing you to check yourself against all of the sorts of things that an organisation who has had a plan and really achieved maturity would have. And if you like the key thing about this is that it enables you to find out where you are and get some ideas for where you are going. So if you haven’t used our score card yet. I am popping the link into the web chat. Really suggest that you have a look at that. Because that will help you understand where you are and also help you understand where you are going.

So what we found in here is that there are quite a number of strengths and weaknesses of organisations that tend to get reflected in the score card. For example if the only reason why your product is accessible is because somebody has taken the responsibility on themselves but nothing is written down, you need better buy in, in the organisation. It could be that people need training and better capability and it could be it needs to be in your product process so it needs to be embedded in there. So all of the sorts of things that can come out of the tool will enable you to understand some of the stuff you might want to consider thinking is key to your plan for 2024. And we have had loads of organisations doing this, so I am going to give a few things we have learned from this before I hand over to Pete who is going to make this really concrete for you.

A lot of organisations have got good intentions but they really don’t get stuff embedded. That’s something that you can consider improving on in 2024. A lack of senior level buy in. A lot of organisations are being pushed into accessibility by people who are quite junior in the organisation. So they are not necessarily being able to spend lots of money on it to the level it would need for the organisation to get really good at this. Because they don’t have the power in the organisation. So that sort of thing, trying to get somebody up above on the C suite behind this is a really good thing. A lot of organisations have an ad hoc approach to accessibility. It’s done in different ways and in different products and different departments. It’s often thought about too late and there is lots of barriers that people have.

And I am just going to give you a flavour of some of these things. So you can see gosh, that might be us. What should we do in that circumstances. Too late. If you are thinking about accessibility really right at the end, Sarah for example before you put a product life, every single issue that you find in that audit is going to cost you so much more money than if you had actually thought will it earlier. So that’s a key things, we found 65% of people were checking products before launch but only 3% were checking at the start of the project to see if their team were anything at accessibility. I would consider that is probably more important than that. Because if your team don’t know what they are doing with accessibility they will be creating something that you will find out later is a problem, much easier to find out earlier. Similarly a lot of people don’t make the stuff, it’s digital suppliers do it and lots of organisations said we forgot to put a question in our procurement about that new digital tool. About accessibility. That’s not going to be accessible. Similarly you might have out sourced the creation of the new website whatever it is to a digital agency. Did you check they know what they are doing with accessibility? They may say they do but what proof have they been able to be able to give you. These sorts of things asked early can be really helpful.

And from all of the research that we did from all of the organisations who had been using our score card. A lot of organisations were saying that they found the problems with their products too late for them to fix them. Literally, they know all of the things that are wrong but they have no money or time left now to fix them. So they have reached for exemptions rather than reaching to fix things, from our perspective that’s a little bit soul destroying. Because you want people to actually have great accessible products, rather than knowing that their product is really bad. You want to improve things, because products that aren’t improved don’t deliver value and that’s the last thing that I want to say here. If you get this stuff right you can get return on investment. There are loads of things to win from accessibility but most organisations just use it as cost and don’t even think there might be something more to win. With the right plan, the sort of stuff that Pete is going to take you through here, there is an opportunity for your organisation to actually win from accessibility. Not just meeting requirements and not just making sure that you are not getting sued but actually delivering great services to people. Who can pay for those services or buy things from you, all of these sorts of benefits that can come if you actually get this right and getting this right is what Pete has been helping lots of organisations to do. So Pete I’m going to hand over to you, take us through how people should plan for 2024.

The first thing to realise is that you need a plan. If you don’t know where you are going you will end up somewhere else. So, we actually need the plan to set things going. Also, when I talked to a lot of organisations there is so many different things to do. Where do you start. And actually the hardest thing is in the budget you have got where do you prioritise. And how do you persuade people to give you the budget you need to do things properly. So we have been working with multiple organisations in helping them develop plans and what I am going to talk to you today about is the one page plan and a couple of elements to get you there. We have done very detailed 400 line, 500 line plans for clients but often when they take it to their teams and leadership the one pager is the key bit.

So we’re going to look at five key inputs to think about your plan. First of all where is the organisation going. What are the strategic priorities of the business, what is your organisation’s promises to the world. Are they a member of the valuable five hundred, have they put something in their corporate diversity and inclusion space and having a good idea of your user demographics. So actually how many people have you got. We did this with one organisation, they are a 2 billion pound business and when we looked at 20% of their customer base that’s something like 400 million pounds worth of influence revenue. So somebody asked me what happens when people don’t care and they wait until they get sued. Ok, do you care about losing £400 million worth of revenue a year. Probably not and what would you spend to keep it? That probably give us an idea of where you might be investing and how much. The second thing is to think about where are you going with accessibility. We talk about the ISO standard 30071-1 because it’s an international standard and it talks about the organisation, the things in place, the governance in place. There is WCAG out there, 2.1, WCAG 2.2 has just been launched. You might have an opinion about which level you want to be aiming for. Some organisations are saying great we have 2.2 let’s go for it and they are still miles away from getting even 2.1 done. So you need to think about the legal requirements for the country you are in. And we have talked in the chat around, do I need to follow the Canadian law, if you sell into Canada, you are going to need to think about meeting the Canadian law even if you are US based. If you are selling into US schools or public sector you have to meet section 508 irrespective of where you are in the world.

The other part is thinking about your accessibility centre of excellence and we are going to talk a little bit about that in a minute. And then where are your products going? Again that’s the prioritisation question, which things matter now that’s going to have the biggest impact both to show at those the organisation and to customers. And where is the buy in, in the organisation.? Is it worth investing your time with a team that don’t care and then get shown up by the team that do and do it well. How do you make sure it’s easy to do it right? A lot of people want to do things right but they are very busy. Developers have got to get a certain amount of code done. Designers have got to get things in place. So can your policies and tools etc easy for people to use at the point of use and what do you need to think about innovation and improvements and how do you get accessibility into that. For one client we were working with, they have a physical product. And we sat down with their physical designers and package designers and product brand team to think about where does accessibility sit in the physical and digital world throughout that process.

And the last one of these five that we’re looking at is where are your people going? In terms of what is their capabilities and their buy in. So I’m going to talk about each one of those in more depth and going to use some illustrations. The illustrations are based on us looking at their organisation. These are not other people’s plans. So I want to stress that. They are a perspective of what they could be. So where is the organisation going, and one of the best starting points is to look at your corporate goals for next year and think where does accessibility fit into each one. So I have taken an example, I’ve gone to a website for a company called Haleon. They produce a whole bunch of health care products including toothpaste, painkillers, things like that and on their corporate website they had four goals. Increase household penetration. Capitalise on new opportunities, strong execution and financial policies and be a responsible business. So where could accessibility fit in for that organisation? Well good accessibility often builds loyalty. So that means you are going to increase household penetration and trust, good accessibility across physical and digital means they can take opportunities of giving people digital information from point of sale. Make sure that you are showing the ROI of accessibility. So that people trust the financials, and accessibility helps show that you are running a responsible business. Those maybe things that then set your plan because you want to crate examples of each one of those.

Take another example, there is a view just taken off the website. So I went on to Jet2 an airline company and they want to be the UK leading and best leisure travel business. Well if you are going to be best you better be good at serving all your customers, so you might want to know what is the influence revenue of people with disabilities. Not just themselves but the families they are travelling with and what impact if you got that right would they become more loyal to you? Would they travel with you in preference to other people. A careful control of the product and make it easy to buy if you have accessibility needs. So what changes do you have on the website to do that. An example of this is, one particular airline says ‘we are accessible, all you need to do is phone our contact centre once you’ve bought your tickets to arrange something at the airport.’Down side, most people hate waiting 45 minutes to an hour to call on the contact centre.

Another airline you just click the tick box and you are done, so that saves an hour, hour and a half of the booking process to the customer. A memorable customer experience again do you make sure those needs are met and supporting long term growth. Again can you show customer loyalty from people with disabilities.

So those maybe are things where you sit and say I need to head towards our corporate strategy. And if you are building out a plan, so I have an example of a one year plan and we often look each quarter for the first year and each half for subsequent years. So what is the one big thing you want to do this quarter and that organisational bit can help you get there. What strategic outcome are you trying to achieve and does this effect some of the communication you are doing. So if we took those examples before. Loyalty, we might need a project to see how many people with disabilities we have got, what is their customer satisfaction, and then as we make some changes what impacts does that have. It’s not I want to change some websites for WCAG, that’s actually work on top of that.

So the next question is where are you going to go with accessibility? And again, typically, audits are very helpful to do this and we have seen WCAG is good but it’s not enough. A lot of organisations are saying WCAG is the standard we’re aiming for, what else are going to do about customer experience.

We recently did some work for the CAA around looking at 9 particular airlines, and I am not betraying any confidence by cutting and pasting out of that report. I am not trying to shame anybody but if you are in one of these organisations, there is still gaps in what you want to do and how do you show to the leadership you are moving up the scale. Things that were common when we were looking at these organisations was keyboard accessibility and keyboard focus, lack of mark-up of headings, so people struggled to get good information on screen readers. Poor accessibility for hosted or third party content. So your audits might give you some ideas about where you want to focus work across the whole team. So if I look at that list, third party content, make we should have a workshop with our procurement team. Work out how we put it into the contracts and have a programme of going back to the existing contracts and updating contracts, it maybe one of our projects next year is to do an end to end journey review and see where we have accessibility gaps, these help you think about the projects you are going to do.

Third part of where do you want to drive is thinking about your changes in particular statistics. How many accessibility issues have we currently got and what is the target for next year and for the year after. One organisation we’re working with four years ago they had 1,800 bugs around accessibility They then worked with a couple of their key customers, their customers did testing, and they prioritised changes across their product set. Last year they got 60 bugs compared to 1800. Or you might look at the number of modules and how many products are out there that you want to show are accessible at a time. You might not get all of them but you can say we’ve got ten now and next year we’re going to go 15 and next year 30. So it’s giving yourself targets around client’s issues, give yourself targets around product features or products and if I take an example of local government you might say I want to take a focus around navigation and search and make it easy for people. And then I want to take a particular area such as information on the site, so information on parking permits, and then I want to do projects around making sure the whole experience for applying for a parking permit from finding it, to applying, to seeing the email status, to the PDF that might come out as your receipt. Are all of those steps accessible?

So we thought about the standards you are aiming for. We thought about some of the priorities you have. The other thing we find useful with clients is taking that score card across the different areas from motivation, support and governance. Where do you fit there and where would you say your target is. This is a typical screen shot of this. this is a summation of everybody who did the survey so far and motivation is high. But capability is low. So you might say our target for the coming year is to take ourselves from 22% in that score to 50%. And we’ll need to go and put projects in place to have the right sponsor. Have a training plan, decide of the many policies which ones we’re going to put in place and decide on which teams.

That takes you into how do we have the framework to put these ideas in place. So a couple of months ago I did a webinar around building an accessibility centre of excellence. If you’re not a member of HiHub, do come and join it. Go and have a search on our website and you can watch that video. But the accessibility centre of excellence gives you a framework of thinking about the types of things you need to do around accessibility. Whether you are 1 person, whether you have 20 people in team. You are going to need to be thinking about the tools and standards and resources you want to have in the business so, what automated testing and auditing tools you have. What checkers do you share with people, so image checkers, reading age checkers. What reporting and tracking do you put in place. What standards do you give out as guidelines, and then you’re probably going to have a variety of people who give you external support. Auditors, trainers, testers, user feedback, user testers and things like that that you can draw from. So this gives you an idea of how you build your capability as well.

In the last, in that webinar a couple of months back we talked about the five steps of getting there. If you have not already got an initial team maybe your plan is for Q1 get the basic team. Q2 show some successes and get the initial budget and build the foundations, quite a few organisations are now in that point of rolling out and scaling, so they have a team and how do I scale across multiple countries, in fact next month’s webinar in December we’re going to talk about what it’s like to roll this out to multi locational, multi national organisations. And the most important one is having time to talk to people to celebrate successes. Either winning awards or tell the business what you are doing.

So this gives you, if you are looking at building a plan, it gives you your steps around your accessibility team and partners you are put in place. What tools you might be buying and when you want to put those out and it also affects policy and governance about what standards you are working to. So that’s taking you to where is the organisation going, what do we want as our north star around accessibility and then how do we prioritise within the business and we looked at and worked with a number of organisations. And one thing that I have seen successful is building yourself a heat map of looking at your organisation and products. And thinking about a number of criteria. So I’ve got on this example, what is the level of business risk for that area if we don’t get accessibility right? So it maybe a particular product that’s high. Marketing it’s high because it could have reputational impact and maybe in finance because people can’t pay us properly. What is the level of accessibility in those particular areas, that might be a review of some of the audits you have already got. Or you may make an assessment from a distance.

One of the things we do with clients is live audits or snapshot audits where we do a rapid review and it’s not a full detailed WCAG audit but it gives you a quick view of a particular product, is it likely to be high risk or lower risk. What is the level of governance they’ve got, what’s the buy in and are they implementing the policies? What are the people capability and awareness like. What support you might want to put in place. So you might say there is different levels of support. We know we have a couple of people on this product who really love and care for accessibility, but in another product area we haven’t got that. So actually we’re going to need to have more support for the other product area. And that’s going to likely give you, what is your key action across those areas. And distil that down into your plan.

So back into building your plan. That helps you think about your areas. For example, with one of our clients, they have a release of product every six months. So what they want to do is in Q1 make sure that the right accessibility features are put into the core product or into specific products so that lands in Q3. So success will be, product X, has these new features in place. You can then work backwards of what training and what support will get them there. It’s going to affect your policy and governance, we see some clients saying if I get procurement right now it’s going to benefit everything we put in the future. If I go and do some training in our developers early on that means they are going to be writing reasonably good code even if we haven’t got the testing or design right. Or you may say we have a major new implementation happening, so we need to get our designers get it right from the start because that’s the cheapest place.

So that’s taken us from product in the prioritisation to how do you make it easy to get right. And there are a number of policies that are out there and in fact there is a few policy areas they quite surprising. Not ones we always think about. I am not expecting to you read the small writing on the screen but one of the things we do is do a policy review and go through the policies and say how accessible they are. Where does accessibility fit in there? How recent were they updated? Do they even exist and for clients how fast can you find it? If it’s going to take you a day to find the policy that means anyone using it is not going to find it. In the ISO standard there are around 31 policy areas that it mentions, do they cover accessibility? Are they comprehensive?

The second part is governance. So your policies may be in place but how do you do your key decision points? Where does that fit with your software development life cycle? Do people use the policies, can they find them and are they the totally embedded in the process? So one of the things we see as quite a good win is make sure accessibility is in your go / no go decisions around design. Treat it in the same way as personal information and security. And that may be one of your quick wins if you’ve not already got that.

And you then look at your plan, which quarter am I going to put that in. So just to illustrate the types of documents you may be looking at and things you may not have thought about. I have a list of about 33 of them, I’m just going to draw out a few of them. One of them is making sure you have got your accessibility policy around your purpose and external messages. There is lots of benefits out there but what are the two or three that really resonate for your business? And have you got clarity on that? Typically, Another one will be what technologies do you support, what technologies do you test against. What browsers do you accept and what assistive technology do you know your product works against.

You are not obliged to support every single assistive technology in the market. And if it’s an internal system you might say we support these two and if you are an employee just as you have to use this browser you are recommended to use this assistive technology. But things that you may not have thought about. What about standards for sales documents, your PDFs that sit on the website. What is your customer service policy? What happens is somebody has a complaint and how do people handle it? What is your policy around marketing and tone of voice? Your readability scores, what age do you write for? Those maybe elements where your teams have not thought about it. How do you put accessibility into your innovation process? So when do you talk to people with disability about design of future solutions? At what point what size project should you pay for that.

So these things help you think about the policies you might put in place and behind the policies is also the tools you need to be thinking about. We believe there is a space for automated tools and there’s a space for human intervention. Automation will not answer everything. Even with AI, which will improve some things, a human intervention a human view is required.

So some organisations say right, we’re going to have this as our standard automation testing tool, how do we roll that out with every product. We’re going to revise Jira or our product backlog tool to track and manage accessibility issues. How do I roll that out to all the development teams? So as a central thing what tools are you going to make available to everybody and what tools do you recommend people buy? That takes you into making it easy to do right. So we’ve ticked into here, that effects what partners we have, what policy and governance we’re rolling out and what tools are we rolling out.

So the fifth, part and I chose to put this last rather than early on, it’s about thinking about the people. Because once you’ve thought about the priorities for what products you are supporting. What tools you have in place, what strategies you have that’s going to then think about what people have you got and how good they are? So typically we do for a number of organisations a skills capability audit. It’s always helpful to ask people. And I’ve got an illustration here where we have asked people things like, have you been trained in accessibility before? So some of the areas, this example is yes, designers but more than two years ago. How would you rate your current accessibility knowledge? So some people might say it’s high and can we test them to see what they are like. And that takes you into a point where you can prioritise what you are going do. A typical skills audit is helpful to see the big picture or you might use a snapshot audit to see if you have gaps in the skills. And you think about what training to put in place. So two bits of training might be developers or other people.

And then that builds you into your plan. Jonathan I am going to pass you back to think about how we bring that together and we’ll go into Q&A.

I was right in the middle of taking a number of people through some questions and things, if you can just give me one moment. And I will be right back with you. Okay. I think my problem has been resolved.

So let me move on. One of the questions is I could solve all the problems myself I would. For you and your accessibility plan it is about a team. The team of internal people, the team and the tools you have got. So don’t feel alone on that. If you are going to take one thing away of thinking about how do I build up a score card. I would suggest, building your plan. Doing the score card is a helpful way of thinking about your strategy. It takes about 15 minutes to complete. It gives you nine different topic areas. You saw some of the stats we have given came from 300 plus organisations doing it. So often you will discover you are not alone but we have had feedback like, by answering these questions it helped me think about the gaps we have got. And if you do this and want to book time with us to go through the results and compare it to others do get in touch.

So that takes you into building your plan, what are you going to do for this quarter? And you can start filling in those elements in the chart and then you are probably going to need to distil things and put your reality hat on. For example one of our clients they are great but they know the internal politics are so slow, they might have an idea but it’s going to take three months to get the buy in. So they have to design a plan that manages against that. For another organisation they have a lot more authority, they are a top down organisation and we can demand stuff but they want to spend more time on compliance. I am going to bring us back into a summary of the five steps. Where is your organisation going so, get yourself that direction setting, that gives you an idea what have the big thing each quarter is. Knowing where your target is is going help you make sure each step, each quarter, each half is heading towards it. Know where your products are going is going to help you prioritise which parts of the business are the important parts to go first and making sure you have the tools to make it easy for people to do. We often find clients do great policy stuff but haven’t had the team and time and resources to land it. So it sits on a website not being used. So if you are building a plan make sure you have capacity for that communications and roll out and that probably brings you into the where people are going. There are some tools I am showing on the screen of things that can help you implement the answers and ISO standard gives you that view about your organisation policy etc.

So I am going to open up to questions. So if you’ve got a burning question based off this please do ask it in the chat. And Jonathan, whilst I’ve been talking are there any particular questions that you’ve seen people raise Sure, so I’ve been answering a lot of them but I am just going to pull some of the more recent ones out here. One person was asking what is the role of persons with disabilities in audits. I can answer that one just to give your voice a break for a second Pete. There are different types of testing, this one comes from a guy called Valta I think. I hope I am pronouncing the name somewhere close to how it’s pronounced. So testing with people with disabilities is always the best thing. It gives you the best results. Because fundamentally it’s authentic and you will learn things that you cannot learn by doing an audit against WCAG or any other set of guidelines. For example, we at Hassell Inclusion did a huge amount of research with people who were autistic because WCAG really didn’t have their needs particularly well represented and the national autistic society here in the UK came to us and said we have had lots of different other bodies, like people at Universities, doing some guidelines for autism but some of them don’t agree with each other. And that’s the sort of thing you get when you talk to real people. Especially when you think about something like Neurodiversity or autism. Everyone’s on the spectrum, so it can be quite difficult to summarise things in guidelines.

The key thing always is that when you actually engage with people who have disabilities, you get a lot more than you would via any other route.

It tends to take a lot more organisation. For example, one of our team is actually going around a supermarket with one of the people with disabilities who we often test things with to test out the accessibility of that supermarket for that company. And he texted me earlier and said I am on the motor way and I am trying to get there, there’s loads of traffic jams and I don’t know if the testing is going to happen. So thankfully it is and that’s happening right at this very moment.
We definitely believe in testing with people with disabilities, but It can sometimes be complex to put together. So there is a role for other forms of audit as well.

Pete. I wanted to, so Andrea’s question, how to best gain the organisation’s buy in as a single entity. I find the wheels turn very slow and as a result colleagues with accessibility struggle and complain about being unproductive. So I am guessing part of the buy in is that last word there which is you have staff that are unproductive because accessibility hasn’t happened very well. Just imagine how productive they could be. Pete what do you think? I was talking to a global software supplier, in Germany because of the law if any one of their X thousands employees has a problem with the solution they have broken the law and it could be a show stopper. The second part is they said what they have had in the past is somebody with a disability, has a friend or colleague or partner who helps them overcome the issue. The more people who can self serve successfully in their job, they become significantly more productive. So you could ask the organisation, are you happy with people with disabilities having a far worse experience at work. And being far less productive than other people when you have the power to make that significantly less? So that’s one part of the buy in. And that’s also, we do a couple of other things to help with buy in. Our snapshot audits are helpful for buy in because people have that practical experience of seeing the product and accessibility versus a document based audit that just says you’ve got problems. We do a benefits workshop with leadership where we recommend people bring both advocates and sceptics together and we go through all the benefits around accessibility and distil those into the three or four that really resonates with that organisation. And the last part is, it takes multiple times to communicate. So in your planning, in your budget, give yourself enough time to communicate.

Thank you Pete. I am just checking through, I’ve been trying to answer some as we have gone through. If you have any other questions please put them in the chat.

One last question from Sarah, How does service accessibility statements fit into the process. I have used them seen as a defence tool and wonder what is the actual purpose of them. It depends which type of accessibility statements you mean. If this is like for example a website Sarah. So an organisation has put in an accessibility statement on the website to say how accessible it is. The other aspect is that you might, if you are for example procuring a tool, say for example using Zoom as the means of connecting us all today. Zoom has a VPAT (a voluntary product accessibility template). You might also hear the phrase ACR (accessibility conformance report). These are reports that vendors who create digital tools make to try and get across how accessible or inaccessible their products are. So the other part of your question is, I have seen them as a defence tool, yeah you saw hopefully that I referenced that earlier. A lot of organisations if they don’t think about accessibility early enough, if they are not doing the sort of things we’re talking about in all of our webinars really, including this one about planning, they are left in circumstances where they have to put something up there that isn’t any where near as good for accessibility that they like and good organisations put the accessibility statement up there. So you can understand at least they are aware that they need to make some fixes. But also make those fixes and then update that statement, to let you know it’s happened. So the date of any accessibility statement or VPAT is normally the key thing. If the date is very many years ago, chances are something moved on in the accessibility of that product. Either for good or bad. Probably for bad because if it was for good they would have updated the date. So that’s the thing to look out for.

Thank you so much everybody for your questions. Pete do you want to let us know what people can get next month. So 2 things out of this. One is we hope we have given you some resources that you can do your planning yourself. Sometimes it’s useful to have an external person to help you with planning, very happy to have conversations with you. We recognise most organisations have multiple suppliers, so the conversation we would have with you around planning recognises that there are tools and suppliers out there that may not be us doing that but it’s quite useful to get an external perspective on what you’re doing and a sense check.

So a couple of things coming up we’re going to be talking about multinational organisations next month. So if you work for a multinational, if you’re in a subsidiary or headquarters very helpful for you to join that one. If you are in a department, don’t worry this could be a helpful conversation around how do you manage your organisation, how do you manage the management structure. We’ll be looking more about laws and regulations,so there was a couple of questions about Canada. So we’ll talk a bit about that. We’ll think about central versus local. And how do you scale. So that and in January our very popular trends webinar is coming up. Jonathan doesn’t have Christmas, he goes around looking at the web to see what is coming up. I’m sure AI will be in that and several other things so do book yourself into the trends. Feel free, please do invite colleagues it does give you a chance to discuss this afterwards, what have I learnt, what have I used. And I am just going to put in before we quit, the link to the PowerPoint for those two templates. We’re not going to be sharing that to the wider group after. So it’s your last chance to grab it and that’s the two grids we used here and you are welcome to adapt it. Other than that, please do join HiHub as well, because that gives you access to all our previous webinars. We have 23 hours worth of material, get stuff from strategy. Great stuff from developers, so come and join us and listen to that. Hopefully we’ll see you next month as well.

Thank you so much everybody. Really appreciate all of your kind comments about us, we like to share the good things we have. If you liked this please book again for the next time. There is going to be a lot of really good stuff coming, thank you so much and best of luck with the rest of 2023 and hope this has helped you with the start of 2024. Cheers everyone. Bye, bye.