Make your draft accessibility plan in 1 hour
– A guided demonstration of the ISO 30071-1 Scorecard

Jonathan Hassell: So today is actually a little bit of a rerun of something that we did for AccessU, so this is an American conference, back in May. We were helping people understand what maturity models are, how scorecards can help. And we thought it would be a really good idea to bring it to our webinar community as well, because a lot of people weren’t able to get to that conference.

What you’re going to get out of today is really three things. The third one is the most important. The first one is just a little bit of an introduction to what is accessibility maturity and fundamentally, why do we need it? Why is it so important for right now? Pete is going to take us through what you can learn from an accessibility maturity model, how it helps you benchmark, compare your organisation’s maturity with others and create plans. Then we’re going to literally do it. I’m going to be encouraging you all to go into the Scorecard, having that on your screen or your phone next to you and I’m going to be talking you through. That’s going to be about 25 minutes where we’re actually going to be doing it. So at the end of this, you actually have a score for how mature your organisation is and the start of some of the actions that could be there in your accessibility plan going forward. It will be a really practical session.

You will get so much more out of it if you follow along with us. For those of you who want to get in advance, if you’ve got a phone and you want to do this on your phone, if you point your phone at the screen at the moment and take a picture of the QR code, then it will take you directly through to the Scorecard itself. If you don’t want to, the Scorecard is at Hassell Inclusion, so that’s hassellinclusion.scoreapp.com. You’ll see exactly why this is a great idea to do as we go through.

The first section, and I’m going to be pretty quick with this, is why we need accessibility maturity. This is actually taken from an address that I did at the Zero conference where our Scorecard won an award a few months ago in Vienna at the United Nations. Here’s our take on things. Digital accessibility has been around for 20 years since the first version of WCAG, and in 20 years we’ve succeeded in making 2 percent of the world’s websites accessible. According to the WebAIM Million survey last year, 2 percent, that’s nowhere near enough.

So what is it that’s getting in the way of organisations actually being able to get this right? Well, the first thing to be thinking about is that people are actually being impacted by this. This is my mum. She’s indicative of somebody who oftentimes isn’t really thought about when it comes to accessibility. She doesn’t have a disability, she just can’t see very well because she’s 82 now. For her, especially during the pandemic, everything needed to be digital and she was having a really hard time of things because she can’t see so well. Accessibility isn’t just for a few people who have a disability, even though that is 20 percent of the population of most countries, but actually it’s about a lot more people than you think, especially in the digital pandemic or post-pandemic age we live in at the moment.

So this is really important to get right. This is why I’ve spent really my working career doing this. The last 20 years, I’ve been trying to make sure that organisations can get good at it. I created the International Standard we’re going to be looking at, based on a lot of my work at the BBC where I was for 10 years and since leaving there, Hassell Inclusion, so my company, we’ve got about 20 of us in the company, we’re helping organisations all over the world get good at accessibility. When we say good at accessibility, we don’t mean WCAG compliance. That’s a good start, but it’s not enough. If you think about it, all of us care about the user experience. That’s the thing that really matters and WCAG doesn’t quite get you there, it’s not quite enough. We also care about it across all of our digital channels. It’s not just websites, it’s social media, it’s everything that we do. It’s this Zoom that we’re using at the moment, as much as everything else. We want things to be consistently good all of the time. It wasn’t working yesterday, but it’s working today, that’s not good enough or it was working today, but not tomorrow. These things need to improve all the time.

It’s really about not just focusing on one product, one website, but saying the whole organisation needs to get good at this. That means processes, policies, training, governance and metrics. It means having a roadmap to enable all of your organisation to go in the right direction and that was why I created ISO 30071-1. That’s what it is. But people don’t like reading ISO documents. So what we’re going to be doing today is using the Scorecard that we created to help make this clear to you and to make it specific to your organisation.

The key thing about this, the reason you should stay with us, is that there is a lot of diversity talk out there, lots of organisations saying we really believe in inclusion. I even had questions from people coming to this saying, should we be doing more to promote things? No, what we want to promote is action. Making sure that you’re actually increasing access to your products because that’s the thing that gets the benefits. Things like excellent customer experience, increased revenue, reduced cost to serve all of your customers and yes, meeting legal requirements is in there too. I’m going to hand over to Pete now and he’s going to chat with somebody who’s used this already and see what they thought. Pete over to you.

Peter Bricknell: Thank you very much, Jonathan. In the audience here, we have Tom Paget. Tom Paget works for an international bank. I’ll let you choose whether you want to name that or not. He works in part of the UK part of it in their user experience area and he’s had a go using the Scorecard. Tom, tell us a little bit about why you decided that you wanted to have a look at the Scorecard?

Tom Paget: Thank you, Pete, and thanks for inviting me onto the call to talk a little bit about that experience as well. I don’t mind telling you where I’m from. My name is Tom Paget, I’m from Santander. I lead the UX and Design team here in the UK. I suppose before we even got to the Scorecard, there’s a little bit that comes before that. We definitely wanted to try and improve our accessibility processes. We’d thought a little bit about how we put that in governance. We’d done some work around accessibility checklists, the point they were making about aligning to WCAG guidelines. Definitely a little bit of a sense that we weren’t quite doing things right. We’d been doing a lot of reading around accessibility at that point, myself and some other people from the team and funnily enough, it was reading Hassell’s Inclusive Design for Organisations book that we found the Scorecard. That’s what triggered us to do it. I would definitely say it’s useful for three perspectives really.

The first is, it gives you a little bit of structure. If you’re anything like me, there’s a lot of material out there to read about accessibility and how to implement it into organisations. But it really gives you some structure around the different areas that you’re trying to push and to improve on.

And it kind of ties into the second part which is measurable. There is some indication of how you’re doing that from an organisational perspective and it was a bit of an eye watering, and I guess, in a moment of honesty with you guys, a bit of an eye watering moment when we were looking at policies and procedures coming in at four percent on that Scorecard. But I think actually just exposing that and realising that was an area for us to focus on was really valuable. I think we definitely struggled with a couple of the questions as we went through the Scorecard. Maybe that’s the point, which is, it was almost the fact we hadn’t even asked ourselves some of those questions that was really the eye-opening moment for us, which is, what do we think about X, Y, and Z, really having to try and think about that as an organisation.

I think the final bit is just that, these guys have touched on it a couple of times, but they’ve written the International Standard on accessibility. Individually, I won’t change accessibility across the organisation. I need a whole other bunch of people to come with me on that journey and to get buy-in. I think because these guys have got the Standard in terms of having written the ISO Standard, that has really helped in terms of being able to sell it in organisationally as well. Happy to take any questions in the chat, but I think these guys are going to do a good job of talking it through over the next 25 minutes anyway. But a bit of an overview of what that was like.

Jonathan Hassell: Thanks Tom.

Peter Bricknell: Thank you very much, Tom. Let’s move on to the next slide. We’re going to talk a little bit about what we can learn from this. Already something like 600 organisations have tried the Scorecard. You’re part of a number of people who have tried it out. We’ve had people across the world work with it, just because we’re UK based, it’s not designed to be UK based, it’s off the International Standard.

I just want to move to think about where are we heading with this and to remind us our goal. The goal is digital products accessible to everyone and that means you’ve got a better reach for your product, a better experience for the users of it, and better outcomes, whatever they want to do, whether it’s opening a bank account, whether it’s working with the local authority and that covers, we need to get the standards right, the people, the process, technology and measures. You may be aware of a thing called WCAG standards. WCAG is really useful. It tells you how your page should look and I see that’s a bit like having a spell checker or grammar checker. You’ve got to get that right, but it doesn’t write you a good novel. The rest of your organisation, the way that you run your processes, the way you think about your choices, the way you measure it, is how you make sure you get that good experience. So that it works hand-in-hand with those other Standards.

I’m going to give you a little sneak of what we’ve already seen. This slide might be small for some of you, but we look at four levels on it from awareness, competence, compliance, and taking advantage of it. We look around nine different areas of which there’s an overall score. We can see with an organisation what their personal result is and you can see what some of the trends are. The more people who do the Scorecard, the better the benchmark is. If you tell us what industry you’re in, you can then see it across industries. We’ve got about 20 or 25 organisations who have done this when they’re in the marketing space. So if you’re a marketing organisation, there’s a chance that you can then get a benchmark. How do you compare to other people? In the self-assessment Scorecard you do, you just get your score back. But what we’re seeing is there’s a lot of motivation and typically the person to do the Scorecard is motivated, yes! Then it comes to much harder to get leadership. Think about ROI, think about policies and governance, and put those things in place. This is the kind of thing that you’re going to get out of doing the Scorecard yourself today.

Let’s have a look at some of the types of information we get. Out of 350 people who’ve done the Scorecard already, only 40 percent of respondents actually embed accessibility into design and we see that quite often companies come to us and say, “Oh yeah, could you do an audit at the end, please? Because we need to do an audit for the lawyer.” If you are a part of accessibility the point and the cheapest way to do this is to get this right into design, inclusive design. Think about disability, in amongst the other things you would think about in inclusive design and the other protected characteristics. You may discover that your organisation is not thinking about it at the start and if you’ve got influence, that’s a good place to say, “Guys, it’s cheaper if we think about it first, and it’s better for us in terms of accessibility is for everybody.” If you’ve ever sat on the metro or the underground and got Netflix out, it’s got captions. I have great hearing some of the time, but when I’m on the metro and the tube I don’t, and so captions work for everybody. There’s other stuff that you do for accessibility that helps everyone. Next slide.

The other thing that we’re finding is very few organisations check if their suppliers deliver accessibility well. We had that with one of our clients who came to us and said, “We realise that our supplier thinks they’re giving us accessibility because it’s in the contract, but it didn’t get delivered.” There was a very embarrassing conversation because everyone’s trying to do what’s right and realise the developers hadn’t been told that they need to get this right too. If you’re in any organisation that outsources development, websites, digital apps, making sure you think about your suppliers is vitally important, making sure it’s in your contract.

The third thing which we’ve seen, if you just move to the next slide, is very few organisations measure the ROI and this becomes a real chicken and egg situation. When we talk to people about investing significant money in getting accessibility right, the CEO and the C-suite says, “What’s the return on investment for us?” It’s fine to say, well, it’s a good thing to do and it’s part of the law, but there’s a lot of good things to do and part of the law for every other part of inclusion and compliance and sustainability, so you actually need to be a little bit more than that. So when we ask the questions in here, think about do you measure ROI, a return on investment?

The last part is that we often think success is a linear line. You see a lot of capability maturity models out there which say right, you just need building block 1, then building block 2, then building block 3, and then you’re going to get there. In reality, you’re cooking multiple things at the same time. There’s several parts happening and that’s why we don’t use this as a pure capability maturity model because you might get one part of the business working well, that’s got up. But there’s something else you need to do elsewhere and you need to do something basic in another part of the organisation. So this is to think about it in the round. It’s thinking about behaviour change, which is why this covers people, process and technology and it’s thinking about the sequence that you want to improve it in.

On that, what I encourage you to do and I’ll pass back to Jonathan and for about the next 30 minutes, we’re going to do the Scorecard. What I really encourage you to do is open up the Scorecard with us now and do it. You’ll get a score at the end. You’ve succeeded in it. You might come back and say, “Well, I wanted to change some of the questions.” You can do the Scorecard again, maybe do it with a colleague, but really don’t just use this as an intellectual exercise and just watch, have a go, log in and do it. Over to you, Jonathan.

Jonathan Hassell: Thank you very much, Pete. Reinforcing that point, as I say, it normally takes about 15 minutes. I’m going to talk you all the way through every single question. It will take us more like 25 minutes, but it’s a really great way of getting a score and getting the first steps on the plan. When you use the QR code or go into ScoreApp, what will happen is you will see something like this. This is the Digital Accessibility Maturity Scorecard and this is where we’re going to be answering questions to get our score.

Before I show you that and take you through that process, I want to show you what you get out of it because sometimes people miss this slightly and they don’t download it. We have a full brochure that comes out of it, that is the sort of thing that people have taken to their bosses. We added the question again when people were signing up for this course, how do I get buy-in for accessibility? Well, buy-in for accessibility comes from having really great materials to try and enable you to get stakeholders to come with you on a journey. We spent a lot of time making sure that we have a document here that you can present to really senior stakeholders that explains what accessibility is and that gives that score of where you are at the moment and then looks through at things like, so here are the scores in each of these areas, and then what we do is for each one of those areas, there is a page in the report that says, because you were at a certain level, these are all the good things that you’re getting, these are some of the next steps that you could do, so if you like, these are the things that you would put into your plan, because effectively what we’re going to be looking at here is how to get a score and then what to do to improve that score. How to get the score is the Scorecard, what to do to improve the score is what we’re going to be talking about at the end in the planning phase. Hopefully that gives you an idea of what’s there. I’m leaving the QR code up on the screen as well, so you can see that.

We’re going to start this together. We ask for a number of details over here on the right of the Scorecard. We want you to put in your first name, your last name, your email, that enables us to get the results back to you. Key thing, a job title. I’m CEO of my organisation, I’m Hassell Inclusion. The reason why we ask these is because people do the Scorecard multiple times oftentimes, and so we’re then able to say, people in that part of the business found this, people in that part of the business found that, so we are able to put them together, that’s why we ask for your organisation name. Your job title just enables us to know how high up in, if you like, the ranking in your organisation. If you’re a Head of Accessibility, then we really would hope you would have a lot of these answers to these questions in your mind already. If you’re just somebody who’s really interested in accessibility, but you’ve just started out, probably all of this will be, if you like, less easy for you to find all of the answers.

We ask for your industry and as I say, the reason for that is if we’ve got that and you want to have a chat with us after doing the Scorecard, we can actually give you a comparison of your organisation versus a completely anonymised average in your industry, so we will never tell anybody else the scores on your Scorecard. But what we do is we average them out over industries so you can see, because a lot of people really like that. We similarly do that with countries as well, so it’s really useful for us to know, for example, that in the United Kingdom, the level of maturity is maybe higher than in some places and lower than in other places. It just enables you as somebody who’s chatting to your stakeholders to say, actually, other people in our country are doing really well at this and it feels like we’re a bit behind at the moment, so how do we progress in this, I need your help. You can put a reference in here that will enable you to say something like, I’m part of this part of the organisation or that part. We did this for one large media company a few weeks ago, different parts of the organisation filled it in, they all came from the same place, but they put their business unit in there.

Peter Bricknell: Can I just pop on the reference, add to that one. We may have some people on the call who are consulting firms who deliver complementary services, so if you’re a digital transformation organisation, you may be brilliant at the software development side. What you can do is do this with a client, this is free for everyone to use, and that reference your client can say please share with and give an email address, and we will share the results because we have their permission with your email, so that you can get a copy and have a chat. We do partner with organisations if they want to do this much more formally in a large number of clients. We’ve got several partners around the world where we have a relationship that they use it and we can provide the data as they see fit. We talk through all the data control issues that that has.

Jonathan Hassell: Great stuff. Thanks Pete. Last thing there, size of your digital team, it just gives us an idea of the size of the organisation. If you’ve got a really big digital team, processes are really important for you. If you’ve only got a team of five people, a process can be literally chatting between each other, so the larger you get, the more important some of these things in here get. Let’s pop in and I’m just going to take you through all of the questions, we’re going to be quite fast paced, but hopefully you can keep up, as I say, pop your questions in the chat and Pete will take you through. If you don’t know the answer, just put in don’t know or for these first ones, unaware.

The first section is all about motivation. Why are we asking you about the motivation of your organisation? Well, this is the stuff that enables things to happen. If the people in the organisation who have the power don’t care about accessibility, you are pushing against a really hard brick wall. The first section here says, how much awareness and buy-in are there from some of those really important people? For example, your CEO or your Finance Director? If they’re really committed, we’re over here on four. If they’re completely unaware of this, we’re over on one. I’m just going to put in slightly random answers for the moment.

The next layer down will be whoever is, if you like, in charge of your digital real estate. Whether that’s somebody who’s in charge of your websites or something a lot bigger than that, where you’ve got lots of tools and apps and all the rest of it. Again, same sort of scale there. D&I, diversity and inclusion, is fundamentally linked to accessibility. But a lot of people who work in diversity and inclusion don’t really understand that. They know that they want an inclusive organisation. They don’t know that to be able to be an inclusive organisation they need to make sure their technology is accessible to all the people who might want to work for them. Again, are they with you or not? Do they understand this? Because if they don’t one of the key things you might want to do as your actions is to actually do awareness with them to take them further on their journey.

Heads of User Experience and Design is the next one. That’s the first bit. The next bit on motivation is what are the benefits that your organisation can get out of it. Now, we do a three-hour workshop on benefits. I’m going to do this in about a minute and we’ve summarised a few of those benefits in here that will be really helpful for you because different organisations need different things. For example, if you’re a retailer, it’s really important to maximise the number of people who can buy from you. If you’re a retailer, you are up high, if you’re a government department, nobody buys from you so you’re right down low. As I say, this enables you to capture the benefits that work for you.

Next one is minimising customer service costs. A government department, all of the stuff they do to try and make sure that they’re running efficiently these days is all about trying to do customer service online because it’s cheaper than call centres or town halls. If you don’t have huge numbers of customers, then this isn’t going to be one for you. Again, what we’re doing is we’re tailoring the benefits to your organisation here. Being consistent with your D&I values, so have you made big commitments, say, for example, to The Valuable 500, that you are really going to care about how people with disabilities are able to work for you or buy from you. If that’s really important for you, you want to deliver that and delivery means high here.

How important is it to minimise reputational legal risks? A lot of organisations in America, for example, the reason they do accessibility is because they’re scared that a lawyer is going to attack them if they don’t. For them it will be right up on high. In other countries, the law may not necessarily be quite so much of a driver, so it might be down low. It just gives you an idea of how to target this to your organisation.

Similarly, you can innovate more if you think about the needs of people with disabilities. A lot of the tech that we use these days, which is innovative, was actually originally created for people who had a disability. If you are an organisation who pride yourselves on your research and development, actually, you should probably be trying to look at high here and to see how accessibility can play into that.

That gives you that first section, that’s all about motivation. I’m going to move on to the next. But that’s the first of those nine categories. We’re going to go through all of those over the next 20 minutes.

Responsibility, this is all about, if you said in your organisation, whose job is it to get accessibility right? Who would put their hand up? Is it one person? Is it many people? Is it no one? Because if it’s no one, accessibility won’t be delivered where you are. If it’s you and just you alone you need to gather some people around you to make this happen unless you create all of the digital in your organisation.

The other aspect of this is that a lot of people do accessibility because of personal motivation. I love accessibility, so I’m going to do it whether my company wants me to or not. But a much more sustainable way of doing things is to say, actually, we have a policy that says, this is who we are as an organisation because we want to get some of those benefits. That would be a clear accessibility strategy.

Who’s responsible? Are your Product Managers? Those are the first people. These are the people who own the websites, the apps, etc. If they don’t know and don’t think about accessibility as their responsibility, chances are things are going to go out that aren’t accessible. We’ve already mentioned digital agencies. Oftentimes, the things that you buy, you may not have asked them to deliver accessibility. The question here is, are they aware that you need them to create things in an accessible way? Again, is it that you don’t use agencies at all. That’s a possibility, or maybe you just don’t know if you ask people at the moment. Maybe actually you’ve got it there in your standard contract terms for every agency that you work with, in which case it would be a clear strategy. But if you don’t have that in place every time it’s not you creating things but a third party, they will be possibly letting you down.

A little bit of a segue. We’re now looking at, so if that was all about products, we’re now looking at the rest of the organisation. Do you have a plan for getting better at accessibility? Is there a plan there? Is it funded? It’s great to have a plan, but if you have no money to make it happen, that’s really difficult. Who owns it? Is it just a vague document that was created some time or does somebody have a job to actually make that plan happen?

Finally, and looking, if you like, at the top level, the real mature ones. You have a plan, it’s funded, it’s owned by someone, and you are actually monitoring that, so somebody’s job is to report to the people at the top – accessibility actually improved this month like this. That’s the sort of place that you would really want to be mature. And the sort of people that you would report to would be your executive stakeholder. Do you have one or not? Is somebody high up in the organisation with you? Because if you have them onside, then things will really work well. If you don’t, again, that’s probably one of the areas you might want to focus. Because as soon as you get an exec stakeholder, it’s so much easier to get budgets and get time from people to concentrate on this. Maybe you don’t know.

Do you have a person responsible for embedding it? It may be that you’ve got people who are trying to make accessibility happen in one product, say one website, but maybe you’ve got 400 websites. Whose job is it to make sure it happens across all of those? Do you have a named person whose job it is to report up to say everything’s going well? Maybe you don’t, maybe you do, maybe you’re not sure.

The other thing would be, remember we were talking about return on investment, it’s really useful for you to know how much money is being spent on accessibility within your organisation. Because it could be being spent by lots of different people in lots of different places. For you to be able to prove that it was good spend, you need to be in control of that. Who actually is checking that? That’s a really useful thing for you to be looking at.

Similarly, you will be having relationships with suppliers. Say for example, you have a supplier who does all of your accessibility testing. Well if parts of the organisation don’t know that that supplier exists and they use a different supplier, you’re really not working together on things. You need somebody whose job it is to make sure that everybody is engaged, if you like, in a similar sort of way. That was how, if you like, responsibility happens in the organisation.

I hope you’re still with us and you’re following along on your Scorecard because this will get you those scores at the end.

The next section is capability. So capability is all about, can your people deliver on this stuff? If you are the people who are actually creating your websites, maybe your documents, then do you know what to do to make them in an accessible way? We’re going to be looking at standards and we’re going to be looking at training.

The first thing is this Standard that we’re talking about today, a lot of people aren’t quite as aware of the organisational Standard, so ISO 30071-1, as they are WCAG. Do you have some understanding, from our perspective, organisations that understand this Standard, normally the ones who are doing really well for accessibility across everything. So it’s worth getting some good understanding, which is what you’re doing today.

The next one is just looking at, if you like, the people who create your stuff. Your digital teams, the people who create your apps, your websites, that sort of thing. Do you know if they’re any good at accessibility? Maybe you’ve never even asked or maybe you’ve asked and they’ve said, oh yeah, sure. But you don’t quite know if you can rely on them. So competence surveys is something that we do all of the time with people because if your people don’t know what to deliver, they won’t do it very well. A lot of them know that if they haven’t got accessibility knowledge, they are probably a bit of a problem for the organisation. I’m not saying that people lie out there, but people maybe overemphasise how great their accessibility knowledge is, when maybe it’s not particularly good. That could be a real risk for you as an organisation. It’s a good idea to actually get people to do a competence survey, so you know you can rely on them to do the right thing.

The guidelines that you use for the products that you’re creating. You may have created your own accessibility guidelines to explain to people how things work in your company. It could be like most that you’re using a bit of WCAG. Maybe if you’re doing apps, you might be using the iOS and Android accessibility standards. But if you’re not using the right standards, you’re going to be trying, if you like, to hit the wrong target. It’s really important for you to understand those.

Similarly, if you are an organisation who creates things like Zoom that we’re using now, that you sell to other organisations, so digital tools, something like a VPAT, a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template, can be another one of those really important things for you to do. To not just say we’ve created a good product, but to actually prove it with a standard document.

Are you training people? We check to see if you’re assessing people, but are you actually training people? Is it ad hoc? Are you doing a little bit of, oh well, people pick things up from Google or whatever. It could be you’ve got a full training programme so that everybody, you know you can rely on them. And the more people who are trained in your organisation to get this right, the better you’re going to be in terms of maturity.

It’s not just your digital team. We all create documents all of the time. I’m presenting to you for the most part in this session from a PowerPoint document. Do you know how to make a PowerPoint document accessible? Actually do people throughout your organisation know how to do that? If you’ve trained them, then all of the documents flying around your organisation will be accessible as well. It could be you train some staff, but really in a lot of ways, that’s everybody in your organisation who needs that training to be really good at this.

The other thing, your suppliers. Have you checked that they’re trained in accessibility? Of course they will say, oh, we’re brilliant at this, but actually, are they? It would be good to check to see. Again, we have a lot of organisations who run our assessments on their suppliers to see if they can really rely on them. Maybe it’s something you do sometimes, maybe it’s something you do all of the time.

The next section is around support. You’ve got people trained now, but what happens if they have questions? Do you have somebody who can actually answer those questions internally? Do you have experts internally or externally who can make that happen? If people have questions, do they know where to go? Maybe they don’t. This is the one that most people do. They outsource accessibility testing. It could be you do it internally as well. That’s great. Either way, if somebody wants their product tested, do you have a mechanism for people to get that testing? If you do and people can find you very easily and always get access to testing, that’s a four. If not, we’re right down here with ones and twos.

Do you provide a way for your staff and contractors to get specialist advice? So testing is great, as Pete was saying. When it comes to shift left, a better way of thinking about things is, let’s not find the problems in the testing at the end of the process, but let’s actually allow people to ask questions of an expert early so that when the testing happens, things are found to be good rather than bad. Do you have somebody you can go to for advice? Could be internal, could be external. But do you have that there? Because if you do, you’re a better organisation in terms of accessibility maturity than another one. Do you have a way for the person who’s running the strategic side to get advice? This will be yes, no, don’t know as well.

We’re moving into policies and practise now. I know we’re moving through really really quick, but I wanted to just take you through all of this process so you can see how all of this works. Do you have an internal accessibility policy? This is the place that you would note down why you are doing accessibility and how you are doing accessibility. It could be you’ve got one of these, but it’s not up-to-date. Or it could be that you’ve got one of these, but actually it’s even better because you’ve got a policy and a plan to actually improve the level you’ve got there.

Do you have a public accessibility statement on your website? If you do, is it up to date or is it really old? Those sorts of things are really important for you to understand because we see so many really old accessibility statements out there, and what they say to people outside your organisation is maybe you used to care but you probably don’t anymore, which is not the message you want to be giving anybody externally.

Is accessibility embedded in the way you do your procurement? When we thought about what tools to use for our webinars, we use Zoom because it’s a very great way of having a lot of people together. But certainly initially it wasn’t very good at captions. That’s why we brought in Verbit to make sure that happens. The tools that you’re buying for people to use, are you asking questions about are they accessible? Yes, sometimes, that sort of thing. You may, if you’re creating lots of websites, have some form of design system or component library. That’s brilliant because that allows you to take good things from one place and make them the bedrock of somewhere else. But the reverse is also the case. If they’re not accessible at all, the bad stuff is happening everywhere, so these are really important for you to get right.

Are your digital design systems working well for accessibility? Do they really deliver it? The Content Management Systems and the JavaScript libraries you’ll be using to make your websites quick. We use WordPress, for example, for our website at Hassell Inclusion, because it’s a really quick way of enabling us to create new pages on our site. Is that accessible? Was that a good choice that we made to use that CMS rather than a different one? Those sorts of things.

Are you thinking about accessibility when you’re looking at the tools people use? Is it included in your workplace adjustments? Pretty much everything so far, we’ve been thinking about your customers. What about your staff? Do you have a process for them to get a screen reader when they arrive? Do you have a process that says every single tool that we use will work with that screen reader throughout their entire employee journey? Or are you still thinking that that would probably be a good idea, but you’re not really doing it yet so any member of staff with a disability would have a hard time working for you?

Is it embedded in your social media policies? It’s great everybody knows that WCAG, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, but web also includes everything you do on Twitter and Facebook and TikTok and all the rest of them. Are the people creating your social media presence thinking about accessibility? Have you got a policy in place to make sure they can do that or are you still working on it? Could be your internal events and external meetings. Really important, as I say, when we were looking at Zoom to try and make sure that this was an accessible experience as much as possible for everyone. But a lot of organisations, if you like, miss that. How are you doing on that?

Those, if you like, are some of the policies and processes you need to get in place to really feel like as an organisation you’re doing really well. A few more areas and then we’ll have time for the plans and what to do next.

Governance is all about is somebody checking to make sure that before you put a website live or whatever it is, that it’s good? Do you audit but forget about fixing things or do you audit and fix things? Do you know what to do if you can’t make everything perfectly accessible first time? Do you know how to do risk assessments or are you just pushing stuff out there that isn’t accessible hoping that it might be okay? Is somebody actually checking? What about agencies? Is somebody checking what they’re doing? How about after launch? Do you forget about it or do you test it every now and again? We’ll often have people saying can you test things like every year? Is that enough? How often are you looking at things? Because it really depends on how much change happens in those products over time.

Are you doing it just for your website or are you doing it for all of the tools? Your apps, your social media, your internal tools, all of these sorts of things. It’s really useful as an organisation to start thinking about your whole digital portfolio, not just your website. When it comes to thinking about those, do you have the same focus on everything? Does everything have to be perfect for accessibility or are some things more important than others? What I can tell you from having done a lot of this is that if you are not prioritising, you are probably going to burn out because you can’t make sure that everything is perfect. You need to target where you spend your time and to have a process to do that. That’s what organisations who are really good at accessibility do.

Then the final one before the last section is a product development process. This is how you create your products. Is it embedded in there for all of your products or just some of them? Then we look at individual parts of it. So yeah, it’s really good to make sure it’s in your testing. But what about your requirements? Do you know the difference in accessibility requirements, for example, from a website and a mobile app. If you don’t, you’re not thinking about that in requirements, then you’re in a no there.

What about when you’re doing design? Are your designers thinking about this? In most organisations, they’re doing pretty well there. But what about browser support? The testing that you’re doing, how are you choosing how to think about the fact that your website might be viewed on lots of different browsers. Is that something you’re thinking about from an accessibility perspective, and the other part of that really is what about assistive technologies? Are you thinking about, I’ve got a website out there, people might be using JAWS and SuperNova, on a PC, maybe using VoiceOver, how many of these things do you need to be thinking about? Well, the more you think about, the more expensive it is to test. So what is a good strategy? Have you thought about that? That’s a really key thing. Because what we want you to do is to be really thoughtful in the way you test. Not just to audit everything, but to say, how does accessibility fit into our test plan, what we’re doing for everything else? How does it work in your project planning? Do people have enough time to actually create your products in an accessible way? Do you know how long it’s going to take?

And then the last two sections. If you like, all of that stuff gets you to a really good place, the last two sections, and I won’t take you all the way through them today, are very much about tracking your spend on accessibility, so that return on investment that Pete was talking about, how much are you spending, but also how much benefits are you getting.

Then the final section is around how you keep up to date. It’s around continuous improvement. How do you make sure that if technology changes, for example, WCAG 2.1 becomes 2.2 and then 3.0, how do you know how to keep up with that change? One of the ways of doing that actually is to come to these webinars all of the time because we kind of help you through that.

I hope that has given you a whistle-stop tour of what’s there in the Scorecard. I want to hand over to Pete now for talking about what to do after that and how to turn, if you like, what you get from that into a plan. Pete?

Peter Bricknell: Thank you very much. I just want to answer one of the questions because several of you asked it in the group. How do we do this for multinationals, subsidiaries, different members of the team, and overtime? You can do the Scorecard as many times as you want. When you’ve done it, you’ll get a link to the web page which will give you your scores. You’ll also get a link to the PDF so you can download it, then you can keep that. Where we work with some large multinationals, we had one which was working at the corporate level, and they had a number of subsidiaries. So each subsidiary did the Scorecard, we then took the data together and we can show how they compared between each other and how they could compare against the overall. That information is beyond the standard Scorecard you’ve got. You can do this manually if you just keep copies of your scores, or you can work with us and we can give you some snazzy graphs.

So, you get different scores at different levels, so what? How do we turn the dial? If you’ve got something with high motivation and a challenge with responsibility, then it’s probably a buy-in thing you need to do, and that means thinking about who your allies are, not just people, you might have an employee resource group. But actually, where we’ve seen organisations really succeed is somebody near the top sees it as their responsibility. If you’re in an organisation where the top has said, inclusion and diversity is very important to us, or they’re a member of The Valuable 500, that’s great. You are the team who are going to make their promise real.

The second thing is if you’ve got something around capability or support, that you haven’t really got a good idea of where your support network is. We often work with organisations where they build the capability and the team, and then they might call on us to give them additional ad hoc support or precise support, or in training. So you then think about building capability. And what we often find is it starts with Lunch and Learns. You might then think about specific groups getting trained. You might then think about video training if you’re a large corporation and how you roll that out.

Policies and practices. This actually is key in governance, policies and practices, and nearly every organisation we’ve met is struggling with that. You want to get it if you’re in a commercial organisation, from sales, to design, to build, to test, to support, and there’s a whole bunch of policies. You need it in your software design method. If you’re a marketing agency, you need it from brand design to campaign briefing or the other side of it, if you are an agency receiving briefs, you need to ask about accessibility from your client. All of those things require embedding it in the organisation and the policy.

Then embedding it into the product so that it’s designed right at the start. You take advantage of new ideas. You look at it in the design. Whenever you come up with your ideas, you think about accessibility. We do a thing called speed dating, where we get people with different accessibility needs to speak with people on the product, and they go, “Ah! So that’s what it’s like.” Somebody I think in the notes said about the physical and the digital side of it. When you think about end-to-end, for example, there’s no point in opening a bank account if the PDF is not accessible, which gives you the summary, the legal contract. So actually, it’s not just the web page.

And then continuous improvement is to think about that for everybody. That’s that side of it. What might be important for you? There’s quite a lot on this chart, I’m not going to read out everything. You can get this in the transcript and in the slides later. But if you’re building buy-in, think about the responsibilities, think about building the business case, doing the Benefits Workshop we do to get the phrase that matters for you. We work with different organisations and the benefit that resonates with leadership will be different in different organisations.

Building the capability, there’s a whole pile of training I just talked about from Product Managers to Campaign Managers to Content Authors. Embedding in the product is making sure it’s really happening in every of the four key conversations that you need it, it’s in your product backlog and people are following it. Embedding in the organisation is you’ve got that in your policies and procedures, so if you’ve got an organisation that do other ISO-type compliance, maybe they should be looking at the ISO for digital accessibility as well.

Think about it in internal comms and external comms. Share success stories. I was working with one organisation and their external website was not telling all the great stories of what they were doing internally. The people inside were a bit embarrassed, just like, “Well, I know it’s okay, but it’s not what I really want, it’s not perfect,” and the problem is if another organisation is telling their story, that means people might want to work with them more because they’re seen as more accessible. People outside might believe they’re more accessible, but in reality, because you haven’t shared your success, people don’t know that you’re good at it.

So there’s a number of things you can do. We’ve talked about the Scorecard. I hope a lot of you have had a chance to finish it off. If you don’t today, please spend a few minutes after this and finish off the score for yourself. You’re going to get really valuable stuff for you. If you don’t finish it, you’ll get a reminder email tomorrow saying here’s a link, please finish it off tomorrow. But when we procrastinate, it doesn’t get done. So please do have a go yourself. If you’re sitting there watching, sit down and have a go with it now.