7 Signs of Maturing in Accessibility and Inclusion

7 Signs of maturing
in accessibility & inclusion
Prof Jonathan Hassell (@jonhassell)
Director, Hassell Inclusion ltd.
Chair, BSI IST/45 (drafting committee for BS 8878)
CSUN, 20th March 2014

Signs of my “maturity” (or longevity) in accessibility
• 13+ years experience in accessibility and inclusion
• regular international speaker and thought leader
• lead author of UK Accessibility Standards BS 8878
& chair of its drafting committee
• former Head of Usability & Accessibility, BBC Future Media
• led work to embed accessibility across
BBC web, mobile and IPTV production teams
• Won BIMA 2008 & Access-IT@Home awards for the accessibility
features of BBC iPlayer
• Product Manager of innovative, award-winning products:
• won IMS Global Learning Impact Award 2010 for MyDisplay
• won ‘Best Usability & Accessibility’ BIMA 2006 for My Web, My Way
• 3 x Bafta-nominated for rich-media eLearning projects using
breakthrough accessibility technologies for disabled children

Welcome to the 29th Annual CSUN…

The frontier’s getting awful crowded… we’re not pioneers any more

The accessibility industry’s aging and growing…
But is it maturing…?

• the full guide on how to transform your organisation
to achieve the consistent creation of web sites and
apps that are usable and accessible to all your
customers, at the most efficient cost
• with practical case-studies from leading
accessibility experts worldwide, including:
• Jennison Asuncion (Canada),
• Debra Ruh & Jeff Kline (USA),
• Andrew Arch (Australia)
• David Banes (Qatar)
• Axel Leblois (UN)
For information on the book, and chance of
winning it, and free access to video case-
studies, click below
More details on how to work towards accessibility maturity
are available in my book

0Models for how you can
measure maturity in
accessibility

Accessibility maturity for organisations - BFD Accessibility Maturity Model

Business drivers – do you know why you’re doing accessibility,
and what you aspire it to do for your organisation?

Standards – do you have documented standards for accessibility; are you
following them; are they maintained; are you influencing the creation of
new standards?

Governance – do you have a governance process; are you actively
applying it; are you maintaining it; are your suppliers following it too?

Resources – are you investing in accessibility; is your spending strategic
or on accessibility innovation; are you monitoring budget effectiveness?

Delivery process – have you integrated accessibility into your delivery
process; are you testing with users; have you created metrics for
compliance; is it resulting in excellent products?

Procurement & supplier contracts – does your procurement process
include accessibility; are you using it; are you actively pursing
partnerships with suppliers that can uphold your accessibility values?

How do you handle accessibility of legacy systems? – do you have a
strategy in place for prioritising when different legacy systems will become
accessible; how far are you through implementing that strategy?

Reasonable adjustments process – have you established how you will
make reasonable adjustments to internal or external tools/widgets that
don’t comply; are you using it and managing it?

Another model for maturity from an unlikely source:
A ‘set of components & services to support lifelong learning in Higher Education’

Intervention: is pretty much what happens when you wake up to
accessibility (usually through a user-complaint), do initial tests, do minimal
remediation, a one-off fix…

Institutionalisation: you start to realise that wasn’t a one-off, and you need
to organise the whole team to make sure problems don’t happen again…

Professionalisation: embedded accessibility becomes the accepted way
you do things…

1Evidence of maturing in…
motivation
and business drivers

Legal Ethical ROI Innovation
Four drivers

Compliance CSR Prod Mgt Corp strategy
Influence on corporate departments

“It’s just the way we
do things around
here...”
Or, even better, just make accessibility the way you work

 BBC MMX
Why the BBC cares about accessibility…
• Public Service ‘putting audiences at the heart of all we do’
– all people pay their licence fee
– we need them all to gain value from it
– enabling more people to use our products gives us better ROI
and reach
• Uphold brand reputation
– our audience expect this from us…
– net promoter (‘would you recommend us…’)
– winning awards…
• Reduce negative feedback
– when everyone funds you…
everyone shares their view
• Legislation and regulation in the background

 BBC MMX
“When we work on
making our devices
accessible by the
blind,
I don't consider the
ROI.”
Tim Cook, Apple Shareholder meeting,
Feb 2014
How do we understand what Tim Cook meant by this?

“When we work on
making our devices
accessible by the
blind,
ROI.”
Feb 2014
Is Apple’s blind access policy because of ethics?

“When we work on
making our devices
accessible by the
blind,
ROI.”
Feb 2014
Or because of legal pressures?

“When we work on
making our devices
accessible by the
blind,
ROI.”
Feb 2014
Or part of Apple’s innovation strategy…?

Apple CarPlay based on Voiceover (designed for blind people)
and Siri (initially designed for people with motor impairments)…

For those without the cash reserves of Apple,
ROI is the best long-term driver by far…

© 2011 Centre for Business Innovation Ltd
- 32 -
Centre for Business Innovation
“Connected Communities, helping you Do more with Less” Engineering Design Centre
OXO Good Grips
• Well-known pioneer of Inclusive Design in
the USA
• Sam Farber’s wife, a keen cook, suffered
from arthritis
“Why do ordinary kitchen tools hurt your
hands?”
• First 15 products launched in 1990
• Sales growth over 35% per year from 1991 to
2002
• The line has now grown to over 500
products
• Over 100 design awards received
The ROI from inclusive design can be great…

- 33 -
So why don’t more do accessibility for ROI?
We don’t make it possible to count…

- 34 -
In the last few weeks, this came up on webaim,
and you can feel the tension in the discussions…

But not on how to do that…And then this happens, and everyone retreats to legal…

Maturity means firing on all four cylinders…

redefining the aim, from
“tick-box accessibility”
to inclusive design

 BBC MMX
BBC view: what accessibility used to be…
• all about guidelines
• techies trying to code to them
• then trying to test with screenreaders
• maybe a bit of testing with real people… if you’re lucky

 BBC MMX
BBC view: what accessibility really should be…
• all about disabled people
• it’s not about accessibility…
or even usability…
it’s about a great user experience for disabled people
• whether they can get the right value out of what we create
• exactly like we aim for, for every other audience
• so that includes enjoyment and fun

Disabled people need usability as much as accessibility…

Inclusion is all about… including the last 20%

“The fundamental requirements for website accessibility, for disabled people, have been
under discussion for years and can be summarised on a single side of A4:
1. Default display of the website to first time users that accommodates the
maximum number of people, especially with reference to fonts, font sizes, colours
and large accessibility, “buttons”. It is anticipated that this will include, at a
minimum:
a. Arial 18 point 75% dark grey type (as per current Microsoft Word definition)
force left aligned with jagged right margin on a light pastel blue background
default, with a
b. A large button, big enough for people with only 5% vision to see easily, to switch to
high contrast alternatives at the top of the screen.
c. A second large button, identical to the one above except with a high contrast boundary
and low contrast filling (on the same lines as a. above) for those who are both partially
sighted and have scotopic sensitivity.
d. A specific button for one of the most common types of colour sensitivity needs (as in
a. except 75% brown type on a dark yellow background).”
And not about losing the other 80% by doing so…

Inclusive design is now in standards:
http://www.hassellinclusion.com/bs8878/

And in site guidelines:
https://www.gov.uk/designprinciples
And being consumed by a wide community:
http://www.creativebloq.com/netmag/10-principles-inclusive-web-design-
5116989

“The majority of people… will find BS8878 a far more
accessible document than the W3C's technical guidelines, and
provides a framework that goes beyond a list of technical
design requirements.
BS8878 emphasises, and this is important, that simply
complying with the WCAG guidelines is unlikely to meet the
requirements of the Equality Act. As BS8878 explains,
organisations can't simply carry out an automated tick box
check of the HTML, but instead need to user test the site or app
itself to ensure that it actually is accessible.”
Martin Sloan, Legal Associate in the Technology, Information
and Outsourcing Group at Brodies LLP
Also recommended by UK legal experts…

expanding the
job-roles accessibility
impacts

Where the key roles are has changed over the years…

Which of these two had most control of the product definition?

BS 8878 clarifies: the accessibility of web products
is in all these people’s hands…
Designers Writers
Project Mgrs Product Mgrs
Finance Legal Marketing Strategy
Snr Mgrs
Research & TestersDevelopers

Thankfully guidance documents are now addressing this…

moving from remediation
to strategic embedding

But not on how to do that…What used to follow when this happened…

All hands to the pump on remediation

But you need to fix the problem in the process,
not the product, to prevent it re-occurring – that’s maturity

CSUN 2012: We all agreed (in at least 7 sessions…)
it’s time to be strategic about accessibility

But most had different ideas of how to do that…

Created by accessibility experts
from:
Reviewed publicly worldwide by:
• 328 accessibility experts
worldwide
• incl: experts in
personalisation, aging, mobile
accessibility, IPTV, inclusive
design, usability, user-
research and testing,
disability evangelism
Thankfully, in the UK we’d already spent years discussing it,
getting that agreement…

Embedding via an organisational framework

Embedding motivation
Designers Writers
Finance Legal
Snr Mgrs
• Need to motivate each
group…
• Or just use a business
case for the top level and
set policy top to bottom…
– check out OneVoice business
cases…
Marketing Strategy

Embedding responsibility
Designers Writers
Snr Mgrs
• Work out whose
responsibility accessibility
should ultimately be…
• Make sure they delegate
(and monitor results) well
• Make sure those delegated
to are trained in their
responsibilities

Embedding through
strategic policies
Designers Writers
Snr Mgrs
TestersDevelopers
• create an Organizational Web Accessibility Policy to strategically embed accessibility
into the organization’s business as usual
• including where accessibility is embedded in:
• web procurement policy
• web technology policy
• marketing guidelines
• web production standards
(e.g. compliance with WCAG, browser support, AT support)

Support for the ‘key role’ of
accessibility programme manager

Royal Mail
Rob Wemyss
Head of Accessibility
Royal Mail Group
“BS 8878 is an integral part of our web
accessibility strategy
It has given us the framework to help reduce
costs and improve the quality when delivering
accessible web products for our customers.”
It’s paying dividends to those organisations that use it…

But not on how to do that…Legal decrees are now supporting strategic action

But not on how to do that…As are DoE agreements in Higher Education…

It’s all in my book…
for information on the book, free
access to video case-studies,
and a chance of winning the
book for free
Click here for
chance to
win book

being able to handle
divergence in needs

Inclusive design is all around us…

- 71 -
OXO Good Grips
• Well-known pioneer of Inclusive Design in the
USA
• Sam Farber’s wife, a keen cook, suffered from
arthritis
“Why do ordinary kitchen tools hurt your
hands?”
• First 15 products launched in 1990
• Sales growth over 35% per year from 1991 to
2002
• The line has now grown to over 500 products
• Over 100 design awards received
And its wins are impressive…

But it does have its problems
BBC iPlayer
disability focus group (2009)
• Vision impaired / dyslexic
• “I like the black – it’s cool”
• “I hate it – I find it really
tiring”
• Aging / learning difficulties
• “it was just too
overwhelming”

“It’s busy. There is no list... It’s a bit
difficult. Once I’ve closed the boxes, it’s
much better for me. I can see all the
options. I don’t need to scroll.”
BBC homepage user testing 2009
“That’s good – it gives everything. 95%
appeals to me”
And not only for disabled people…

“You can’t do that…”
“You must do this…”
But it can be reductive, lowest common denominator…

But why ‘design for all’…
when you can ‘design for me’?

“Serving the tails (and the tails of the
tails)”
Gregg Vanderheiden
It’s the only chance for really serving everyone

See Brian Kelly
Academic ideas of
‘holistic approaches’ and ‘alternatives’

See GPII
Have become fully-funded international initiatives

And tools that give you low-cost ’design for me’

And recognition for user-personalized
approaches in Standards…

consensus and
professionalisation

Source: http://www.un.org/disabilities/
Global consensus on the need:
UN convention on Right of Persons with Disabilities
153 signatories, 112 ratifications Countries that have Ratified
Algeria Argentina Armenia Austria
Australia Azerbaijan Bangladesh Belgium
Bolivia Brazil Burkina Faso Canada
Chile Cook Islands Costa Rica China
Croatia Cuba Czech Rep Denmark
Dominica Ecuador Egypt El Salvador
Ethiopia France Gabon Germany
Grenada Guatemala Guinea Haiti
Honduras Hungary India Iran
Jamaica Japan Jordan Italy
N. Ireland Kenya Laos Latvia
Lesotho Malaysia Malawai Mali
Mauritius Mexico Mongolia Montenegro
Morocco Namibia New Zealand Nicaragua
Niger Nigeria Oman Panama
Paraguay Philippines Peru Portugal
Qatar Rwanda Moldova San Marino
Saudi Arabia Seychelles Serbia Slovenia
S. Africa S. Korea Spain Sudan
Sweden Syrian Arab Republic Thailand
Tunisia Turkey Turkmenistan Uganda
UK Tanzania Uruguay Vanuatu
Yemen

UNCRPD
National legislation & regulation
National / international standards
WCAG 2.0 => ISO/IEC 40500:2012
=> Section 508 refresh & Mandate/376
Global consensus on link between need, legislation
and technical standards

We all agree WCAG 2.0’s not perfect,
but it’s a good base to grow from

Using WCAG 2.0
for what it’s good at… Not what it isn’t…

Addressing its gaps…
We need ways of addressing its gaps…

Addressing its gaps…
In ways that can cope with tech advance

Time for strategic standards to be globalised?

Evidence of professionalisation

7Evidence of maturing…
recognition/acceptance
into the mainstream

Evidence of specialist education and training

And now evidence of recognition in mainstream education & training

And now evidence of recognition in mainstream tools

We’ve come a long way… but aren’t quite there yet…

“It’s just the way we
do things around
here...”
Journey’s end…

For information on the book, a chance of winning it,
and free access to video case-studies… send us
your details via the form on the next slide or visit:
http://hassellinclusion.com/book/
There’s much more help for your journey towards
accessibility maturity in my book

Get in touch…
e: jonathan@hassellinclusion.com
t: @jonhassell
w: www.hassellinclusion.com

7 Signs of Maturing in Accessibility and Inclusion

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