Building a culture of accessibility

Posted on Friday, 19 April 2024 by Felicity Miners-Jones in Strategy

Accessibility isn't solely important in the final product; it's crucial at every step of the process. Adopting accessible practices from the outset unlocks your team's full potential. This approach not only improves the products you create but also nurtures a culture of inclusivity within your organisation and means your team will more accurately reflect the diversity of your customer base.

Building an accessible culture you can be proud of often starts with HR professionals, project and product managers, and leaders within your organisation. These effects can be amplified in small organisations where the culture is more adaptable.

Recruitment

Working with a diverse team starts at the recruitment stage.

Review your recruitment process to ensure your website and job adverts are accessible. Use inclusive language, provide necessary accommodations, and review your company values to reach the most diverse talent pool. This is a good opportunity to review all policies to verify they are inclusive and start to build your own inclusive employment resources.

By the time your new hires are ready to start, ensure your onboarding and induction courses are accessible. Discuss reasonable accommodations with new hires and provide managers with training on how to best support people with disabilities.

Training

It is beneficial to provide accessibility training courses to increase awareness and understanding amongst your teams. Setting clear objectives for individuals and teams to increase accessible practices can then capitalise on that training. This could start with training and tasking your design team to update or create an accessible design system, your marketing team with updating style guides to use sufficient colour contrast in branding, or your communications team with publishing accessible social media posts that include text descriptions for images.

Embracing accessibility training not only raises awareness and understanding within your teams, it also nurtures an inclusive mindset and a culture of continuous improvement.

Inclusive communication

Effective communication is at the core of any successful team. Use clear, concise, and unambiguous language in all internal and external communications so everyone, with different reading and learning styles can fully participate.

Provide an agenda ahead of meetings, whether in person or virtual, so colleagues can prepare. Send follow-up emails with a summary of the agreed action points to establish clarity.

Not everyone is comfortable speaking up in a group environment. Offer alternative ways of communicating such as posting a comment in the meeting chat, submitting agenda items in advance, and ensuring you give time and space to everyone present.

Clarify the tone and context for communication. Some organisations use formal language with customers and colleagues and prefer to use email. Others may prefer informal instant messaging channels where the use of emojis is appropriate. Clear, context-specific guidelines are especially useful for neurodiverse colleagues.

Accessible formats

For your team to work at their best, provide equal access to the information.

Produce documents in accessible formats and provide training on creating accessible content in software packages like Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and PDF. Microsoft Office offers detailed information about how to create accessible documents and additional resources.

To ensure content is inclusive, there are some things every member of your team can easily do:

• Always provide text descriptions for images and graphs

• Don’t rely solely on colour to convey information such as a red highlight for an error in a form field or colour coding in graphs and charts

• Provide a logical headings structure in Word and PDF documents as well as on the web

Many of these accessibility fixes can be done without needing a technical background, only awareness. Use the Accessibility Checker in Word and other file formats to check documents as well as the quick accessibility tests anyone can do which require no specialised tools or knowledge to help you check your work.

Video is a great way of making information more understandable for people who struggle with text. Video can also be helpful for people who are blind, Deaf, or DeafBlind if you follow an inclusive approach to video production, and incorporate closed captions, audio descriptions, and transcripts.

Finally, ensure all the software and platforms your team are required to use are accessible. Many products have an Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR), a formal statement documenting how well a website or app complies with international accessibility guidelines. If procuring new products for your team to use, always ask the software vendor if it has an ACR.

Inclusive leadership

Your leadership team sets the tone for accessibility within an organisation. Lead by example, champion inclusive behaviours, and set specific objectives for your teams. Implement a top-down approach, where accessibility is woven into the fabric of the organisation and modelled in the day-to-day running of the company. There are lots of ways to do this such as setting up:

• An accessibility working group, made up of people from different roles and teams who set the agenda for accessibility efforts
• An accessibility champions network where people champion accessibility practices in their area including engineering, product, content, facilities, or any other areas of your organisation
• An empathy lab, where employees can build their understanding of accessibility

While shifting organisational culture is undoubtedly challenging, the rewards of prioritising accessibility are manifold. By embracing accessibility, you create a workplace that not only empowers every individual but also produces products and services that are inclusive and accessible to all.

Next steps

Find out more about our recruitment support service and training courses or read about how to embed sustainable accessibility into your organisation.