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Accessibility Taskforce

Overview

As a designer, I had regularly identified accessibility issues throughout our website, however due to the distributed nature of our product teams, it proved difficult to action solutions to these issues. I felt that this was down to a combination of poor awareness of the importance of accessibility, and a lack of ownership of accessibility initiatives. To that end I founded a taskforce to strategise a solution to the existing accessibility issues, and embed a culture of inclusivity into our teams.

Recruitment

To raise awareness of accessibility, both in general terms of how important it is for our users, and also where we are currently lacking at Holland & Barrett, I ran a presentation session to the product and tech team, aiming to educate those attending and garner interest in the subject matter.

I used this forum to first introduce the concept of the accessibility taskforce. Immediately following the meeting I sent out a form for people to apply for the taskforce. I collected information on people’s normal business roles, experience with accessibility, available time commitment, and motivation for wanting to be involved.

I did this so that I could ensure those who joined the taskforce would be engaged and not willing to drop off because of lack of time and motivation. I wanted to know about their experience, not so we could exclude people based on lack of experience, but to ensure I understood what training would be required for members, and to also try and have a few key members with more experience with accessibility, who would be able to support other people in the team who were less experienced.

Strategy

The taskforce has two key aims:

  • Solve existing accessibility issues on our website and app, to achieve a base standard of AA compliance by the end of 2023.
  • Build accessibility consideration into our software development lifecycle, so accessibility is considered at all stages of our design, development and QA processes.

In order to achieve the first goal, we created the following plan:

  1. Identify issues and create tickets
  2. Prioritise according to greatest user impact
  3. Build buy in with the product teams
  4. Create roadmap to place issue resolution into quarterly plans

Organisational Support

One of the key challenges we faced as a taskforce was ensuring the tickets we raised would be worked on in an appropriate time scale.

In order to address this, we spent time with the Heads of Product, where I presented a story of why accessibility was important for our business, with an emphasis on the financial, legal, brand and human impact of providing a more inclusive experience. We then put forward a proposal for how accessibility could be built into the product roadmap, and shared our vision for how accessibility would eventually be built into our product lifecycle.

As a consequence of this engagement, we garnered support from these stakeholders, who encouraged us to provide the tech teams with our accessibility roadmap.

Roadmapping Accessibility

Using a combination of external audits, and manual and automated testing, we identified a large number of accessibility failures on our website and app.

We then went through and prioritised these based on the following criteria:

This enabled us to understand the key issues to focus on as a priority to have the maximum impact on accessibility in a short period of time. While the end goal is to become as compliant as possible with the WCAG AA guidelines, this gave us a plan which would be feasible to achieve alongside other organisational goals for the financial year.

Training

In order to build buy in with the distributed product teams, I began building a training program for various teams, so that the importance of accessibility was understood and product managers felt empowered to make an impact.

One of our goals was ensuring that accessibility was build into the end to end software development lifecycle, so to that end we felt that we needed to provide training to not only the product managers responsible for ensuring the accessibility failures were addressed, but also to designers, developers, and QA teams to prevent new accessibility issues arising over time.

So far training has been delivered to:

And training for developers is due to commence shortly.

Looking forward

We are still in the process of tackling our goal of becoming AA compliant by the end of the year. However at the same time we are looking towards the future of how we can become truly inclusive in our product processes.

To that end, we are looking at a number of initiatives to raise awareness of accessibility within our tech and business teams, so that eventually building accessibly will become second nature.

This has included:

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