How to create and integrate an accessibility agenda

In order to truly serve your whole customer base, you need to be thinking about accessibility.

If you knew that even one of your customers unable to access a certain area of your website, purchase a product or benefit from you support because they couldn't access the information they needed, you'd care about it, right? What about those people who aren't yet your customers, but are trying to be?

With more and more organisations digitalising now being the norm across sectors and products, there's a real risk of excluding certain user groups all together down to the fact they simply cannot, for whatever reason access the information, services or support they need.

To paint the clearest picture on the impact of accessibility on digital customer experiences today, let’s take a look at some stats:

• 11 million in the UK live with hearing loss
• More than 2 million people in the UK live with sight loss
• 30% of people in the UK live with dexterity problems
• 5 million adults in the UK struggle to read and write
• 1 in 4 disabled adults in the UK have never used the internet

That's a lot of people we need to be thinking about when we're designing a digital experience.

Why you need an accessibility agenda

70% of websites in the UK are inaccessible. Many organisations are unaware that they fall short of industry standards. Those who are aware, often feel lost and overwhelmed with where to start on effective digital accessibility initiatives.

An accessibility agenda serves both strategic and tactical goals. Our recent work with Versus Arthritis was driven by their organisational commitment to inclusive and equitable access for the 10 million people in the UK suffering from arthritis. But the impact of accessibility is not just limited to the non-profit sector or health organisations. Inclusive and equitable access to any digital customer experience directly increases reach, brand awareness, and usefulness for existing and future customers – no matter your audience.

At this crucial juncture of digital development, all businesses and brands have an obligation to bring accessibility to the forefront of everything that they do. This starts with WCAG compliance for all digital solutions.

Assessing accessibility with an audit

An accessibility audit is the first step to improving the end user experience. It’s an extensive exercise that gives stakeholders a bird’s eye view of how an existing site stacks up to industry standards on equitable access. We often use a sample-based approach, examining the most critical pages along a user journey. A lighthouse report brings this data to life, providing a clear and consistent picture. With this, organisations can see which issues need urgent attention and take steps to prioritise short-term efforts. Versus Arthritis used the findings of their accessibility audit to approve an immediate sprint that applied fixes to the most crucial issues discovered – bringing them quickly up to standard on primary best practice for accessibility and compliance.

Understanding accessibility with workshops

With urgent compliance issues identified and addressed with an accessibility audit, you can now closely examine just how the website serves your customers, where it may need a boost, and how different areas of your organisation may need to think about inclusivity and equity in the customer experience. This is where internal workshops come into play, bringing together several stakeholders from across your organisation to map out a digital ecosystem that works for employees and customers. For Versus Arthritis, we delivered three individualised sessions that would become the foundation for a 3-year roadmap for strategy and implementation. Collective workshops like these are built on the principles of accessibility and inclusivity: ensuring an equal understanding of best practice standards across your organisation. They're brilliant for surfacing current and potential aspirations, discussing best practice standards and potential organisational activities, and establishing next steps.

Planning accessibility with user research

No accessibility agenda is complete without the people it’s meant to serve: the users. More often than not, organisations build an understanding of their user base with limited data, differing stakeholder perspectives, and misleading assumptions. When partnering with Versus Arthritis, we went straight to the heart of their community, interviewing a diverse set of users, including arthritis patients, their caregivers, and medical professionals. We were able to paint a more accurate picture of our audience, demystifying them and removing preconceptions about them. User research gives organisations concrete insights to guide their digital customer experience strategy and decision making. It illuminates more precisely what does and doesn’t work with key journeys, usability, and communication – leading to research-backed recommendations for website navigation, content, design, and user personas. From here, work streams can be easily prioritised and a backlog of future improvements agreed upon.

The impact of accessibility on brands

Creating an accessibility agenda is not just about meeting the minimum standards – although that’s a start. An impactful accessibility agenda is a well-researched and considered one, precise enough to quickly action short-term goals for compliance and in-depth enough to deliver on long-term goals that bring your digital customer experience in-line with brand values. It encourages conscious decision making within your organisation and enables more engagement from more users than ever before. Prioritising accessibility and inclusivity as part of your customer strategy isn't just about transforming how your audience interacts with you – it’s about transforming how they think about you.

If you want a helping hand

When it comes to understanding your audiences, and how you can better serve them. Get in touch, we can get you going on the right path.