4 steps to get accessibility on your company’s agenda

Published in

UX Collective

7 min readJul 21, 2019

Designing inclusive experiences has always been something that I’ve been passionate about, and have built awareness of over the course of my career. But I realised recently that designing for accessibility is actually the (relatively) easy part of building inclusive products.

The most challenging part is usually getting buy-in to prioritise accessibility improvements where you work.

I have been hugely lucky to work at organisations (the BBC and now Monzo) that truly care about creating inclusive experiences. But that doesn’t mean that it’s always easy to get accessibility changes on the agenda, especially when you have incredibly busy product teams with competing priorities.

In this article I thought I’d share some practical steps (4 to be precise!) that I’ve picked up during my time at the BBC and Monzo, which I’ve found help to get more attention focused on accessibility.

1. Get everyone involved

It’s easy to see accessibility as a design problem, but the whole product team needs to take responsibility for creating inclusive products. More than that, it’s best to involve as many people across the business as possible, to help push for change across your product(s), and even make your organisation itself more diverse and inclusive.

In my experience it’s often product managers, or senior stakeholders who make the time for accessibility changes once they’ve become aware of a problem. And it’s taken me inviting them to testing, or looping them in on some research findings, for them to have the information they needed to do that. We need to invite more people to the conversation, and share our knowledge of accessibility and the opportunities we see.

But it’s not just about senior leadership. Literally everyone can contribute and diversity of experience is always a good thing — you’d be surprised who might turn out to be a screen reader or colour contrast expert.

In fact at Monzo it’s our incredible vulnerable customers team who have been the driving force behind many of the accessibility changes we’ve made, and they’re not a product team. Our frontline customer support team also act as incredible champions for change. They’re the ones who have first hand experience talking to our customers and helping them through any difficulties they face. They gather feedback and ideas and report back to product teams (via slack), which acts as a resource for inspiration and evidence that can help push for change.

2. Raise awareness

Awareness is the most important factor in getting accessibility onto your company’s agenda. Many people have the best intentions but often aren’t aware of the problems and the number of users that can be affected. It’s also the best way to ensure that accessibility is considered early on in a project, instead of being tagged on as an afterthought.

Invest in training

The best way to raise awareness (other than step 1!) is to invest time in training to spread the word about why accessibility is so important and how it can be improved.

Often when I say this people are worried that I mean expensive training for the whole team but that’s not the case. There is so much training online, as well as free resources, and accessibility meet-ups that cost next to nothing (the London meetup is £1.50 and you get free drinks and pizza!).

The image above is a trip a group from Monzo took to the Government Digital Service Empathy Lab which you can organise for your team for free (it’s generally only open to public sector employees…but ask nicely!). They have a range of assistive technology and simulators to help you understand how to design for all your users, and to raise empathy.

Take advantage of team knowledge

The other way to get cheap training is to run it yourselves! At the BBC we had an “accessibility champion” network where people from across the business attended training/awareness sessions (e.g. on how to use screen readers) and then distributed that knowledge across their teams.

At Monzo we’ve been pulling together training resources, and knowledge shares on everything from assistive technology to auditing tools. And we’ve also run accessibility training for product managers and anyone else that wants to know more.

3. Think small

This one may sound counter intuitive but many stakeholders worry that accessibility improvements are a lot of work, and it can pay not to scare people by diving in at the deep end.

Small changes can have a big impact

Small changes can go a long way. To get accessibility 100% perfect isn’t easy, but a lot of the most common and damaging mistakes are often relatively easily corrected. By focusing on small changes that are easier to fit in to your roadmap you’re more likely to get time to work on them, and then show the impact they’ve had. For example, adjusting colours to meet AA contrast guidelines, and ensuring all images have alt descriptions is a great start.

Leverage best practices & broader benefits

What I’ve also found helpful is focusing on the fact that many accessibility improvements are design and engineering best practices. For example a common screen reader downfall is just poor labelling (e.g. headings not being labelled as headings, links not being labelled as links).

It can also help to point out the broader audience benefit of changes. For example, something like poor contrast doesn’t just impact users with vision impairments but also people using an older device, or any device in bright conditions.

On this point I’ve found the Microsoft inclusive toolkit manual to be incredibly helpful. The guidelines discuss the “persona spectrum” and how all users can be affected by situational and temporary impairments, ultimately good design is inclusive design.

Credit: Microsoft inclusive toolkit manual

4. Make it easy

I mentioned that accessibility isn’t all about design, but we can definitely help to make it easy for everyone else. Even at the BBC, and Government Digital Service (who are leaders in inclusive design) it can be difficult to ensure that everyone has an awareness of accessibility, and how to design and build for that purpose. So the last step is to use patterns that have accessibility baked into them.

Invest in design and code libraries

Both the BBC and Monzo have invested in component libraries for designers in Sketch, and an equivalent library built in code. This means that everyone is designing and building consistent experiences. And accessibility can be baked in without every designer or engineer having to have an in-depth understanding of all the dos and don’ts.

Having these libraries also has a few other benefits:
- accessibility will be considered from the start of a project, rather than being an afterthought;
- it may free up time for more QA (testing the code across devices and assistive technologies) and/or usability testing; and
- your stakeholders will love it as it makes you more efficient!

Use native and browser patterns

The other thing that can “make it easy”, as well as helping accessibility, is making the most of native and browser patterns. Sometimes as designers we can be guilty of reinventing the wheel and inadvertently negatively impacting accessibility in an effort to improve usability or make something look “better”. I have definitely made this mistake before!

As well as being familiar to users, native/browser patterns are designed and built to be (for the most part) accessible, and when we design custom patterns we can mess this up. It’s best to use these patterns as much as possible, and when you do feel that a custom pattern is needed, make sure that you speak to your developers about any potential impact on accessibility, and how to mitigate those risks.