Removing barriers: our approach to digital accessibility

To mark Global Accessibility Awareness Day on 19 May 2022, Ronise Nepomuceno, Digital Accessibility Manager, describes how we’re taking strides towards making our products and services accessible.

Digital Accessibility is more than a buzzword at BT, EE, and Plusnet. Here we focus on action. Our Accessibility Team works hard to make sure that every one of our customers feels welcome. We want them all to access our products and services through our digital front doors. After all, Digital Accessibility is far more about practice than words.

We are creating a culture where Digital Accessibility is everyone’s responsibility. Instead of an Accessibility champion network, we have a peer-2-peer community where everyone focuses on removing and preventing digital barriers, allowing disabled people to participate in the digital economy.

When writing this article, our Accessibility community had around 500 colleagues, all sharing knowledge and working together to find inclusive solutions.

But how do we achieve this?

• We start by being super-organised. The word ‘process’ might seem boring. But a well-designed process increases efficiency and improves communication and quality of delivery. Our process gives our squads a structure to embed Accessibility from the start and as part of the ‘definitions of done’.
• We design with people, rather than ‘for’ them. We share our knowledge and learning journey with all our colleagues and love when our engineers check their work with a screen-reader.
• It gives us enormous satisfaction when our Design teams celebrate differences, using research and lab testing to improve our experiences.

• We are fearless, transparent, and evidence-based: We don’t beat around the bush. When something is not quite right, we say so, and we work towards changing it.
• We are still learning: We know we still have a lot of work to do before saying that the Digital Experience we provide is genuinely inclusive. We know we are not perfect. We see mistakes as opportunities for growth.
• We are optimistic: We know that at some point, the impact of our work will show.
• Finally, we celebrate every achievement, no matter how small it might be, such as replacing a complicated pattern with a simpler pattern that everyone enjoys, or showing that any feature on the web can be usable by everyone as well as beautiful.

As we start our preparations for the Global Accessibility Awareness Day on Thursday 19 May, we hope to increase the engagement of our colleagues even further. We look into a future where we will soon be able to see the impact of the work we are doing, with Digital Accessibility as something we all experience rather than just talk about.

Find out more about Global Accessibility Awareness Day and get involved >