The 5 Keys to embed Accessibility into your Organisation!
Hello everyone! I recently read a book “Inclusive design for Organizations” written by Prof. Jonathan Hassel.
It’s very informative for any organization that is looking to begin the process of implementing accessibility (a11y) practice into their digital products/services. Hassel also explains how to embed a11y in daily workflow and make inclusion successful in an organization.
I would like to share with you the 5 keys necessary to embed accessibility in your organization.
Are you ready to share your Brand’s success story by embedding inclusion in your products & services? Let’s get started!
The FIVE KEYS — To embed accessibility into your organization:
- Expand Awareness
- Embed Strategy
- Enable Process
- Measure Effects
- Continually Evolve
1. Expand Awareness
From my personal experience, awareness is something we should really consider to make this journey a successful one. Most of the time, I find that people working on design, development, and QA are not aware of a11y and they are not sure how it impacts the differently able community.
So, it’s critical to work on the first key element “Expand Awareness” before you go any further in your journey towards accessibility competence and confidence.
The first key is expanding your thinking about why you should go on the journey at all — examining the reasons and motivations to find what best fits your organization’s culture, purpose, and products or services. Will your organization aim to be a leader or a follower in accessibility? How should accessibility be balanced with your other organizational and project priorities and audiences?
To be worth doing at all, accessibility needs to be considered in the right way! With about 20% to 40% of your new potential audience caring about how you handle the accessibility of your products/services, it isn’t about not losing, it’s about winning. Winning a bigger audience group! Winning a better brand reputation! Just WINNING!
Now that sounds far more interesting and motivating, doesn’t it?
2. Embed Strategy
Now that you are aware of the benefits of a11y and gaining your confidence in promoting accessibility, it’s important to work out how to do it right in your organization, and how to do it right all of the time! The first aspect of this is to break tasks down into their components.
The components of Accessibility Maturity:
- Embedding motivation and responsibility — setting your commitment and budget, then making sure you break down responsibility for accessibility so everyone knows who should do what.
- Embedding competence and confidence — making sure everyone knows how to do things that are their responsibility via the provision of training and guidelines.
- Embedding support — making sure your staff have a source of expertise to which they can take questions when their training or guidelines aren’t enough.
- Embedding accessibility in policy, not just people, or your policies may hinder rather than help your progress.
- Embedding governance — making sure you set and regularly benchmark progress against inclusion goals.
3. Enable Process
The third key plays an important role to embedding digital accessibility in your digital product development lifecycle process.
If we do not embed accessibility at the process level, we will keep trying but failing. Accessibility must be built into the development lifecycle, like how we build privacy and security at process level.
How can we build accessibility using ISO 30071–1:
ISO 30071–1 standard defines a holistic approach to the accessibility of information and communications technology (ICT) by combining guidance on implementing the accessibility of ICT systems (ICT accessibility) both at organizational and system development levels. It also provides guidelines for building and maintaining ICT systems (including products and services) that are accessible to diverse users (including users with disabilities and older people).
ISO 30071–1’s eight activities and best-practices:
The eight activities to be considered in enabling your process are:
- Specifying the widest range of potential users
- Specifying user goals and tasks
- Specifying user accessibility needs
- Specifying accessibility requirements
- Specifying accessibility design approach
- Ensuring accessibility requirements are met
- Ensuring communication about accessibility
- Ensuring integration of accessibility in system updates
Ensure you can deliver consistently for all your products, whether they are similar or vary in purpose, audience, technology or importance. This is about identifying good accessibility results every time, while being flexible to handle any type of project.
And to be clear, Hassel is not talking about a checklist — something that seems to be synonymous with accessibility in many people’s minds; he is talking about the process.
A documented, flexible, repeatable process that each member of your project team buys into for every project your organization runs.
Hassel also explains ISO 30071–1’s best-practice advice is to enable your staff to get accessibility right all the time by embedding it in your standard digital production process, because then you will uphold accessibility not only in every new product that you create, but also in every version of those products.
4. Measure Effects
The fourth key is measuring the effects your a11y work achieves. It is fundamentally about the effect your work has on the user experience of the disabled people you’re trying to help, as well as the rest of your non-disabled users.
Unfortunately, the tools we have now for providing ROI on a11y users is yet helpful, because we don’t have analytics on who is visiting your website. Is it a blind person, a person who has broken arm, a user from disabled community or a non-disabled user? You don’t have these metrics yet!
It’s important that you do everything possible to enumerate and put a value on the benefits that your accessibility program is creating, as well as capturing its costs.
Let’s outline some of the benefits you get from accessibility and start in the context of measuring them:
- The risk-mitigation value of not being sued (the value of the ‘a11y insurance policy’).
- The value of minimizing the cost of handling accessibility complaints after launch.
- The PR value of any awards for your digital product, either specifically for the accessibility and usability of the product!
- The impact of your product’s level of accessibility on the value of your brand. This is not easy to quantify, but you can do surveys with your users by including questions about accessibility/inclusiveness of your product and monitor the responses.
- The value of minimizing the cost of customer service.
Hassel says one final thing that’s essential for improving your ROI figures is to promote your accessibility. To show that your accessibility program is helping you ‘win’ and ensure your hard work has been worth it, start promoting the results of your accessibility work to the audience who needs it!
5. Continually Evolve
The fifth key is one that you may think is just for organizations that are already getting good at accessibility and inclusive design. But it includes the one thing that accessibility does to potentially make your organization rich — INNOVATION. And you don’t need to be a tech giant to do it.
Accessibility and inclusion are never ‘done’. Technology is constantly changing and improving, so knowing how to evolve your accessibility thinking and practice is essential. What’s more, thinking differently can actually help you move technology forwards. Innovation comes with the territory.
If you’re thinking, ‘We’re good at this already, what’s next?’, then your organization has the opportunity to look into the innovation possibilities/projects that engage with the needs of people with disabilities which also benefit everyone. This may start new innovations in the areas of AI, chatbots, autonomous vehicles, smart cities, internet of things, and even more.
What’s more, if you seize those opportunities, you can reframe accessibility for teams. Instead of seeing it as a frustrating exercise in following rules that slow down product development, they will view it instead as an exercise in questioning all the established conventions of digital to create something innovative. Accessibility done well can be the sort of thing that helps you retain the best people in your organization as you use its challenges to spark their creativity, not hinder it. Accessibility innovation is not just for the tech giants; it’s for anyone with the imagination to make it happen.
Let me know if your organization is ready to become a leader or a follower in accessibility! Ready to win a big audience group? Ready to win a better brand reputation? Ready for new innovations?
As a summary, I believe, if we succeed to embed accessibility into our organizations’ strategies and develop accessible products, the digital world will be a much better place. For all of us!
