An accessibility strategy

For the last two years I've been spearheading the accessibility efforts at my company, what3words. My goal? Simple (okay, maybe not so simple). Make what3words not just accessible to our users and employees, but a leader in accessibility. For us to be successful in this goal, I quickly realised that accessibility needed to be woven into every fibre, every person and every role in the company.

So I developed a model for how companies can do this based on my own learnings but also the advice and guidance from many of my mentors and accessibility colleagues. My hope is this model can be used by others to replicate what I've done at what3words and make more companies accessible.

Note this strategy was developed for a small to medium sized tech company and although it can be applied to most companies, a model for bigger, public or non-technology oriented companies might look a little different. Some might include a whole section on compliance, a formal accessibility policy and the legal teams might be more front stage.

The model

The model I created is in the shape of a pyramid. At the very top of the pyramid is the Leadership. The second level of the pyramid is split in 3 sections: Communications, Culture and Innovation. All these pieces of accessibility feed into the biggest one at the bottom of the pyramid: Product.

Let's explore these in more detail.

Leadership

I put it at the very top because I strongly believe that without the support of the leadership it's going to be very hard to achieve any substantial change. Let me put it this way: accessibility is more successful when it's a top-down approach. So this is a call to action to all technology leaders out there to simply make accessibility a priority from the onset.

We have this assumption that accessibility will require a huge amount of additional work but that doesn't have to be true if you do it right from the beginning. Accessibility is not necessarily about doing more work, it's often about making better decisions. And making those decisions early.

I'll give you an example. People who use screen readers use headings to navigate a page, just like a sighted person would. When you open a newspaper, you look for the headlines before committing to an article. You don't read the entire newspaper from start to finish. How the code is written determines if headings are available to screen reader users or not. For the techies out there, this means using semantic HTML, so a lot more <h1>, <h2>, <button> and <label> and a lot less <div>. So making a business decision that a website should be accessible means that the code gets written more accessibly from the start. It's not more work, it's just better decisions. If, however, you only decide to make the website accessible afterwards, you'll have to go back and change a significant part of the code. So yes, in this case, it will be a lot more work.

Are you with me yet? No? 😬 Here's a few more arguments:

• It's the right thing to do. Period.
• Watch how a disabled person (unsuccessfully) uses your product. It's often a case of people not knowing how disabled people interact with technology. Seeing the barriers that they themselves are imposing on others has a powerful effect.
• It can generate good press for the company showing that accessibility is taken seriously.
• It's commercially smart to make your product accessible. People with disabilities are the biggest minority group with over 20% of people having a disability. So if your product is not accessible, you're basically losing out on 1 out of every 5 customers/users.
• It's the law. This is a bigger concern for public entities but private companies also get sued.

Are you with me now?

Thought so 😉 Now it's your turn to take on the accessibility leadership. And here's a few pointers to where you can start.

Communications

The second level of the pyramid model had 3 sections: communications, culture and innovation. Let's look at communications first. How your company does PR and marketing or any internal or external communications also has to include accessibility.

Is the social media team trained on creating accessible content? Do they know to add alt text to images? To capitalise hashtags? Do all videos have captions? When planning a marketing campaign, are people with disabilities represented? If so, are you choosing actors with disabilities? Are you following the motto 'nothing about us without us'? If hosting a conference, panel or talk, do you have live interpreters? If recording a podcast, are you sharing the transcript? Are the sales decks and presentations accessible? Can everyone access the content of the emails your organisation sends?

These are just some of the questions I would encourage anyone who's pushing for accessibility at their company to also ask about. Communication is the company's brand and face to the world and accessibility efforts won't be complete until they are woven into how the company communicates with the rest of the world.

Culture

I define an accessibility culture as one where everyone feels a responsibility to contribute to making the company, product or services more accessible to people with disabilities. And this is the secret to success towards what I call sustainable accessibility. Accessibility professionals often joke that their job is to walk themselves out of a job, but it's true! The dream is that everyone in the company has embraced accessibility so well, that we're no longer needed.

Some of the things to look at here include:

• Hiring: What percentage of your employees identify as having a disability? Do you hire people with disabilities? Are you making sure your hiring process doesn't discriminate towards people with disabilities? Have you trained hiring managers on unconscious bias?
• Inclusive culture: have you trained or run awareness campaigns for all employees on accessibility, disability lived experiences, accessibility etiquette, unconscious biases? Do you have a diversity group and is accessibility part of the conversation? Do your employees with disabilities feel comfortable openly talking about their disability?
• Processes: are your processes accessible? Are the tools that your teams use accessible? Do you need to go back to third-parties and request accessibility improvements or change tools altogether?
• Physical accessibility: Is the building accessible to everyone? Can wheelchair users easily access toilets, kitchen, working spaces? Are doors wheelchair friendly? Note that remote work is a great advantage to many people with disabilities but it shouldn't be an excuse for companies not to create an accessible workspace.

Innovation

This is one is one of my favourite parts of the model. Many of the world's best inventions were first created with accessibility in mind. Leading the way in accessibility offers a great opportunity to bring about innovation that will benefit not just people with disabilities, but everyone. It will also increase your company's competitive advantage and strengthen your position in the market.

Social media companies are leading the way in automated alt text. This new technology can now easily read text on images and give an automated description of the content of an image, a game-changer for screen reader users. The recent improvement in automated captions is also exciting, specially in an increasingly virtual world. And although these technologies are far from perfect, it's a step in the right direction and we should encourage more innovations like these.

For example, all of us working in maps have a huge opportunity to rethink the concept of the map, an intrinsically visual element which simply doesn't work for a portion of the population. Can we reinvent the map so that the information that many of us are used to getting visually can also be transmitted in different ways?

There is so much room for innovation and accessibility is a catalyst for it, so let's embrace it!

Product

This section deserves its own article so I'll only give the top line structure here. Your product is ultimately what you're putting out there for your customers to use so it's arguably the most important component of your accessibility strategy. You want to make sure accessibility is present at every step of the building process. When defining and designing a new product or feature, accessibility should be a consideration. Did you know that 67% of accessibility issues originate at design stage? It's very important to include accessibility at the design phase.

It's equally important that software engineers consider accessibility. Not all developers can be expected to be accessibility experts so I suggest making accessibility as accessible as possible (yes, pun intended) with easy-to-follow documentation and guidelines. Automated tools such Eslint plugin, Axe Chrome and Axe Core can help your teams detect and fix accessibility issues early on.

Finally, testing with people with disabilities is a crucial component of making your product accessible. There are issues you will never pick-up on if you don't do user testing with people with disabilities. Mark my words. So make sure you're thinking about this too.

Conclusion

I hope that by putting my learnings down on paper and creating this strategy, I'm able to motivate others to bring accessibility to their companies and inject it through all the different angles discussed here.

Any thoughts, feedback, questions or comments please reach out!

And thanks for reading.

Gigi