Designing Accessible websites – Webinar transcript

Conference chair: Simon Minty (SM)

Guest speaker: Jonathan Hassell (JH)

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Operator: Good afternoon Ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the designing accessible websites webinar. My name is Maddie and I will be your co-ordinator for today’s conference, for the duration of the call you will be on listen only however and the end of the presentation you will have the opportunity to ask questions. If at any time you need assistance please press *0 on your telephone keypad and you will be connected to an operator. I will now hand you over to your host Simon Minty EFD associate and Director of Sminty Ltd to begin today’s conference Thank you.

SM: Thank you very much Maddie, welcome everybody I hope you are well looking forward to this, this is the first time I have done a webinar like this. Maddie has been very useful setting us up. I know we have a few people phoning in from Royal Mail, if any of your colleagues are only watching it and not dialling in do give them a little nudge coz they are only going to get half of this. What’s going to happen is there are three major bits of this, I’m going to kick us off giving you a little bit of background obviously the housekeeping on how we will do this call. The main bit in the middle will be from Jonathan Hassell He runs a consultancy called Hassell inclusion, before he work at the BBC in terms of accessibility and websites and technology. That will be pre-recorded it’s going to be a very good technical day today if it all comes together. After Jonathan has finished we will have him and myself online.

We have got a few questions from some of you already but we would like you to think of questions as you’re going along, maybe the fact that your calling in says to me you’ve got a couple of burning issues around that so after Jonathan finishes his presentation if you let us know your questions and we can tackle them and maybe have a conversation.

Ok so let’s have a little look I have jumped ahead of myself here in terms of housekeeping. There’s two ways you can do these questions, you can use the chat window to the right of the screen and as I said we will pick these up at the end not during the webinar. Alternatively we can link you in and you can do it over the telephone, I’d rather you did that, the reason I say that is if I’m not quite sure what your question is we can come back and clarify but you have the option to do it either way if you get any technical problems dial *0 to speak to an operator which I’m guessing will be Maddie. If you get and problems during today do let us know here at the forum email is events@forum.org.uk. We are constantly trying to make the events as accessible as possible for example if you have a visual impairment or hearing impairment we want to make sure we can get you to come to these webinars on the day like everyone else. Any thoughts tips or feedback is always welcome.

It’s going to be recorded today to make it a resource available to other members. When you are putting forward your questions and if there is something a little bit sensitive you may want to change it as it could well be public, or maybe you just don’t mention which organisation you’re from but hopefully there’s nothing to secretive.

This is the little show off side of me I awkwardly will pick out a couple of bits I have been associate to the Employers Forum on Disability for something like 15 years, I also run my own training consultancy company. I do a little bit of work with the home office as well I work with media, some of my clients including the Royal Mail who as I said are on the call and Logica I am having a call with you tomorrow not the people

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on the call but some other people. Generally working as I do with organisations I also do a little bit of stand-up comedy. We currently have a show at the Soho Theatre called abnormally funny people and we actually perform their monthly and its good fun.

OK, that’s enough about me. Let’s get on to my little bit after my lengthened introduction we are going to talk about the business case for making your websites accessible I hope for some of you that will just kind of bolster some of the arguments because I’m suspecting that you’re not all absolute IT specialists. Some of you will be, and you might be looks for the information on how you do this, and there’ll be others of you who maybe need a bit of information to justify why you need to make your website accessible.

Looking at some common problems, looking at finding solutions obviously, there are some recognised standards that we’ll run through, Jonathan Hassell will be embedding accessibility within your organisation through policies and proceedures. He picks up on some of the things we’ve mentioned and I am going to do this introduction. Obviously we’re looking at further resources and my bit which will be at the questions and answers and – to repeat – we would love some questions from you.

So lets have a look at some of the statistics. 71% of disabled people use the internet to find information on goods or services. You may say that’s… well, lots of people do, but I think when you start looking at the next one – 54% of disabled UK citizens consider the internet access essential, compared with only 6% of the general population. We can debate for the rest of the hour why that might be. It could be impairment related – the fact that people don’t have to go out and about and life’s a lot easier to do some of this through the internet, but it can just be other reasons, and I know myself as a disabled person that the variety of stuff that you can get from the internet which you can’t necessarily get from your local shop – or indeed knowing about things that exist. We also, as disabled people, share a huge amount of information via the internet, so when one of us finds a good retailer, a good supplier, we will share it with other people.

So, significantly more than the general population, in terms of the absolute essential use of the internet. 1.3 million disabled people in the UK are excluded by inaccessible and badly designed websites. The classic – I don’t know, suggestion – is that it’s people with visual impairments. Well yes, of course, but there is a huge amount of software – as some of you will well know – that can basically… it’s not the input for people with visual impairments, it’s getting the output: what is on the screen, how do you navigate it, so their screenreaders – their software – will be great, but if your website isn’t compatible or isn’t linked to that then suddenly you’ve made it inaccessible. Also, there’s people with learning disabilities, people with motor or physical impairments, that – you know, may be limited in terms of physical hardware for this, a keyboard, a pointer, and it’s making your website as accessible as possible to as many people as possible.

This is not a UK thing, obviously it is called the World Wide Web – excuse my pun – but these accessibility issues are anticipated to affect similar portions of the population worldwide. And this is where it kind of gets – Simon, you’re getting into

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millions of people and your also getting into small countries of people who could be excluded. And I just think it would be kind of crazy – looking at the list of you, you are all international organisations, so there wouldn’t be any reason why you wouldn’t want international people to access your website.

There is no reason why creative and interesting websites should not be accessible. I was trying to think of some, and I did struggle a little bit, and the things that I would say is that the BBC is a fantastic example of just a huge wealth of information, but it is also accessible. And that’s the critical bit.

Building a website which is barrier free is no more expensive than building an inaccessible website. So if you’re getting it in at the time – if you’re starting to think of a new website, start building in those accessibility features that Jonathan will be speaking about later on.

Making an existing website accessible can cost a little bit more, maybe 5% of total development expenditure, the bit that I would say to you from running my own website – Sminty.net and the comedy one – the tricky bit is when you’re updating it. Because you change things, and you put new information up, and you want to make sure that it’s easy to keep those accessibility features in, because websites are not static. So make sure whoever is doing it, not only is it perfect when you’re setting it up but any changes can also ensure that it remains accessible.

Investment can significantly increase market share, and it’s already alluded to, its about making it accessible to all users. If you’ve got it up, you’re going to reduce maintenance costs, enhance your reputations, and we haven’t mentioned it strongly yet, but there is a legal liability risk here as well. Under the Equality Act, it should not discriminate against disabled people. Trying to put that in another word or another language, it’s about… well, offering a less favourable service to someone who has a disability. A good example – it’s quite an old example – but it was at the Olympics in Sydney, and their website, they had some special offers for tickets, but you could only get this through the website. Now, if the website is fully accessible, you haven’t really got a problem… oh, I’ve just got a little not, I’m just pausing because some people can’t hear the content… I’ll carry on and we’ll pick that up, but if others are struggling, do let us know.

My point about the Australian part was that this was a unique special offer that was only available via the website, and their website wasn’t accessible to people with visual impairment or learning disabilities, so therefore, you can see, you have actually denied someone that possible service. I suppose a way round, you could say, well give us a call – give us a call on the telephone and we will offer the service to you the same way. We have a case going through at the moment – RNIB – The Royal National Institute of Blind people – versus BMI, the airline – I haven’t got the details, but you can have a little look on the internet – I’m not a big fan of cases, I am a fan in terms of it clarifying bits of legislation, so we’ll see how that goes. And I just had a curious moment, I was recently in Australia, at a Holiday Inn, and I was going to come back about a week… I was leaving and coming back a week later, and I said to them, what’s the best rate, so we’re standing there at the counter – the check-in counter, and they said, well, you need to go on the internet. And I found that – or go on our website – and… it was curious, I’m sounding very old now, but the

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idea that I would stand in front of a person, and ask for their best deal, and they say no, you need to go to our website. My bit with the – and I know InterContinental and Holiday Inn are very good at this – is, if you are saying the best deals are by our website, you must make sure your website is accessible as I’ve already alluded to.

OK, I’ve alluded to some of this already as well, who are the people who can be mostly affected – I’m always cautious of kind of limiting this down, but maybe to give you some specifics of what it is.

People with visual impairments – things like unlabelled graphics, that is – you’ll probably see it – if you roll your mouse over a photo or a graphic, you should really get a little pop-up box which says what’s in there.

Undescribed video – this would be an audio description, so they can see what’s going on, sorry, they wouldn't be able to see what’s going on if they have a visual impairment – but they might be able to hear the audio that they can’t tell if there’s big moment’s of silence or if there’s something else happening.

Poorly marked up frames or tables – again, its about legibility for screenreaders, and – I’ve alluded to it – lack of keyboard support or screen-reader compatibility.

Hearing impairments – a lack of closed captioning or subtitling for audio. Love the fact you’re putting videos up there, is it possible to have a button so you can switch on subtitles. And proliferation of text without visual signposts. So, if you use British Sign Language, and you’ve learned that as your first language, there isn’t a written equivalent, so if it’s just very text heavy without any visual signposts it could exclude certain people – I’ll be honest with you, it may put a lot of other people off as well.

Physical impairments – alluded to this as well – lack of keyboard or single-switch support for menu commands. This is because other people may have different bits of kit which will be suitable for their impairments, it’s about making sure your website allows that person to navigate it quickly and effectively.

Cognitive or neurological impairments - lack of… you know what, I think this is for everybody, but I can see various people who might be more affected, but lack of consistent navigation structure, a lack of illustrative non-text materials, and flicking or strobing designs on pages. The best and now topical again example of that was the 2012 games, the Olympic Games – you remember, there was a furore over the design of the pink 2012, the sort of abstract design, but where it got more complicated they had some video where it strobed and moved, and some people with photo-sensitive epilepsy were experiencing some real difficulties with it.

Just as a little one, and again, these are some old stories but they may be new to you, originally when Tesco kicked off their shopping online, they had their fancy-pants, lovely, headline website. They also designed one that was a bit more basic, it was a more accessible – screen readers and so on could use it – what they found was more people were going to use this. Not because more disabled people were necessarily persuaded to use their service, just all their customers found their slightly more straightforward website a lot easier to navigate to use. And I’d also say, slightly diverting, that people like Apple – the computer manufacturer – with all their apps,

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they have certain guidelines now that if you want to make an app for their system, it has to have some compatibility features in terms of accessibility. And I love that – that’s them saying, if you want to play ball, you’ve got to get things successful in the first place.

OK, finding solutions – so we’ve come up with some of the problems and some of the specifics, and we’ll speed up a little bit here because I do want to get to Jonathan.

Ask disabled people to give feedback on their experience of using your website. It is clear and obvious that that would be a very good idea and you can do that internally in your staff, or maybe more, preferably sometimes, an external group.

Design an action plan, taking into account the barriers that are most significant, and those that would be easiest to remove. And identify those who need to be involved. They can be slightly broader, so your suppliers and your partners.

Involve disabled people at each stage… when I’ve done accessible website audits, I’ve always done two things – one which is a technical report, which will say this works, this doesn’t work, this isn’t compatible, this is a glitch – and they you have what I call usability, so just how comfortable and pleasurable was it to use.

Stay ready, stay vigilant – I alluded to this earlier on, as you update things make sure you don’t lose your accessibility. And include your comms – train , equip HR personnel, web team, to understand how to communicate with disabled people and make appropriate adjustments – by that, it’s simply meaning if people have request, that you have a little process to put them in and change things.

In terms of… the big word I’m going to mention, if you see me speaking at Beyond Big Type, which was the sort of design day that the Employer’s Forum used to run, we always used to emphasis this word guidelines. These are not rules. Yes, I’ve already told you the law does kick in, although not heavily right now, but these are guidelines, so these are sort of suggestions, and they should always be married up with good design, you know, pleasing features and so on.

But, you have two standards of web content accessibility guidelines, the WAI, or Web Accessibility Initiative – they are worldwide. I believe there is a third stage as well, but it’s almost like a gold standard to get there. Also, the BS 8878, British Standard – Jonathan, who will speak in just a minute or two, had some involvement in this – this is how to commission, plan, implement and maintain accessible websites. The Employer’s Forum, who’s obviously hosting today, have an Accessible Technology Charter. That’s been signed up to by quite a few organisations, and I know Jonathan will speak about this in a moment, and of course there’s the Equality Act, it will give you, hopefully in sorts of codes of practice some examples of how to make this real and practical.

***audio breaks at 18:31

Picked up at 18:40

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The next stage is going on to Jonathan Hassell and then afterwards we will come back to you and take your questions, preferably as I said by telephone but if not via the sidebar where you can type it in. To remind you, Jonathan’s part is pre-recorded, the reason being he is on a train as we speak, so we’ve got him to pre-record, its about 18-19 minutes long, there’s a fair few slides, so it will be going at a fair pace, we will be coming back after that and if technology and trains all work in harmony we will have Jonathan and myself here to answer any of your questions. So, I hope you enjoy Jonathan’s next presentation.

JH

Well good afternoon my name is Jonathan Hassell, and following on from Simon’s presentation of the business case of accessibility, I’m here to get practical with you, to talk about ways you can embed accessibility within your organisation to appeal to the sorts of people that Simon was talking about.

A word about me first – I’ve been working in this area for around about 10 years, mostly at the BBC, where I led work to embed accessibility across all of the teams there: those that created websites, mobile sites, mobile apps, even things like ???. I won a huge amount of awards for that, for providing services to help accessibility on things like iPlayer, BBC homepage, that sort of thing.

The other good thing is, I’ve not only bee the service provider, helping other product managers make their products accessible, I’ve also been a product manager, of innovative products to help people who are disabled to get a much better experience of websites. So that enables me to see accessibility from a product manager’s perspective as well as from a service provider’s one.

I left the BBC about 9 months ago, I’m now an independent consultant and trainer, running Hassell Inclusion, and a lot of the work that I do is helping organisations use British Standard 8878, to embed accessibility in their organisations rather like I did at the BBC.

Hassell Inclusion is, like a lot of you, a signatory to the EFD Accessible Technology Charter, and one of the things that I wanted to bring to you today is to support a couple of the policies that you’ve made in that Charter, if you’ve signed up – specifically 8 and 9. 8, which is all about using a development lifecycle for your ICT solutions, the products you’re creating, the websites, etc., that’s based on inclusive design from definition to delivery. What is that, and how do you do that? Also, obviously number 9, which is all about encouraging your ICT supply partners, the people you procure solutions from, to make sure that they are providing solutions to you and you are purchasing solutions that are as accessible as possible, making sure that your procurement business issues are ready to fit with your commitment.

You’re in good company with those commitments – right about the start of last year I was asked by Vanguard to talk to the heads of diversity and inclusion of a number of the top blue-chips across Europe to talk about innovation and how diversity and inclusion can enable organisations to become more innovative, and one of the things

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that all of the organisations were saying on that day is that what would really make a difference to their inclusion practices was to know how to strategically embed inclusion in their culture and business-as-usual processes rather than just doing, if you like, ‘another inclusion project’. So this is something that a lot of people – not just across the UK, but Europe and the rest of the world, are really interested in.

It’s very, very different from the way that people do accessibility at the moment, which is very much about ticklists, about making sure that you comply with a lot of good sets of guidelines that are out there, but ticking boxes really doesn’t get to the nub of what we’re about – inclusive design does, it’s very holistic, and it enables you to think about the breadth of your project. So, it’s about what we don’t want to do, and inclusive design is what we want to do – how do you get there, ton inclusive design from where you are now.

Well, I’m here to say that BS 8878, the standard I created, provides a huge amount of help there. Not only does it present the business case, the sort that Simon has been talking about, but it gives advice about how to embed accessibility strategically within organisations. It shows how an inclusive design process, which identifies the key decision which are made in the web product’s life cycle, which can impact accessibility. It recommends an informed way of making those decisions and a way of documenting all of this to ensure best practice.

What can it help you achieve, in terms of results? Well, this is Rob Wemyss, Head of Accessibility from Royal Mail Group, they’ve been spearheading a lot of the implementation of BS 8878 out there at the moment. This is a quote from him: ‘It’s an integral part of our web accessibility strategy, it’s given us the framework to help us reduce costs and improve the quality when delivering accessible web products to our customers.’

Improving quality, reducing costs, that sounds like a good thing to be spending another 10 minutes of your time thinking about.

So, why is embedding accessibility in your organisation essential, to get those sorts of benefits?

Well, I believe that the accessibility of your web products is in a lot of people’s hands, and not just in those technologists that maybe some of the guidelines would leave you to believe. People at the coal face: developers, well is great for them, designers – it’s got a few things in there for people who chose the colours you’re using, the way you navigate. Writers, the words that you have on your website, and there’s a lot in there about how they could use those words as well. There’s also a few things about how your testers can actually test to see whether or not your products are accessible, according to the guidelines.

But above those people, you have project managers – is the project coming in on time, is it on budget, can you afford to spend a lot of time thinking about disability. Product managers, actually is your product aiming at the sort of audiences that accessibility tries to include – so you should always try to include people who are disabled, but maybe your product managers say, this is the wrong sort of people –

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so, that can take all of the efforts from these developers and designers who have been trying to do really accessible stuff when they say, that’s not the priority for us.

Above those people, you have finance people – we can’t afford accessibility. Legal people – we know the equality act asks for these things, but no-one’s been sued under it yet, so this isn’t a priority for us. Marketing people – you know what, accessible products aren’t sexy, it’s not our priority. Strategy – we understand the business case for older people’s use of the Internet is getting bigger and bigger as time goes on, but for us not a priority at the moment.

And then right at the top, hopefully you don’t have a senior manager that looks like this, but this is the person at the top that says yes or no to these sorts of things. This is the person who effectively needs to sign that charter.

And for you to be able to fulfil those ???, you need to be able to embed motivation for inclusion and accessibility into all these people, or, have to make sure that the people at the top say that we really buy in to this on a business level, and so we’re going to commit to doing this.

So if you’ve got that motivation there, you then need to embed responsibility. Who’s responsibility should it ultimately be in the organisation for the products of the organisation to be accessible to the widest audience that you may have. They’re obviously going to delegate that, down through the organisation – that’s the right way of doing things – but are they going to monitor it? How’s governance going to happen? And how are they going to make sure that the people they’re going to delegate that to are trained in their responsibility. It’s really key.

Also key is about embedding accessibility in strategic policies of the organisation. I’ll give you an example – when it comes to marketing guidelines, an organisation may have spent a lot of time and money on getting a specific colour on the logo type of the business. Well, if you then find that that colour actually doesn’t come up to the colour contrast standards which are allowed on the accessibility guidelines, its very very difficult to change at that point – that colour may have been the result of a long process, and a huge amount of money spent on it, so by then it’s too late. You need to have accessibility across all the policies to make sure that when you are creating products based on those policies, that the policies are supporting the ideal – the aim – of creating accessible products rather than products where the policies are undercutting them.

There are a huge number of policies that have an impact on whether or not it’s easy or hard to make the products that the organisation creates accessible, both strategic ones and also portfolio policies, and I’m not going to have time to go into all of these at the moment, but I am here to ask questions later and I will let you have all of these slides, so you can look at these, and I’ll give you the links in the follow-up information should you so desire.

So, that’s talking about how to embed it in an organisation – how to embed it in the processes, essentially, as well – this is where inclusive design comes in. To give you an example of why this is so important, BMIbaby are being sued by the RNIB at the moment, for not making their website as accessible as it should be. Now, if you were

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in that situation, what would you do? I’m guessing this is what you would do: all hands to the pump of remediation, get this pain to go away as quickly as possible. What do we need to do to make sure that we do not lose this law suit. And that is about short term fixes. The problem with short term fixes though, is that they don’t prevent the problem reoccurring. To do that, you need to fix the problem and the process, not the product, so that things going forward, you are not creating products that are inaccessible, it becomes just your way of doing business.

So, we need to embed accessibility through your production process – we would say, a user-centred inclusive production process is key to all of this. So identify the key decisions that impact whether the product will include or exclude disabled or elderly people across the whole of the web product life cycle, pretty much exactly what is there in commitment 9 of the Charter. So how do you do that?

Well, the first thing you need is an informed way of making good decisions – how do you know you’re making a good decision? Every decision should be recognised as a decision, have all options and implications of those options considers, to be made based on justifiable reasoning, as that will give you great protection under the law, and to note down all of those decisions – so you can check to see whether or not they were good ones, in the future, or bad ones. And you need to do that at every step of the process.

In BS 8878, we have a process with 16 steps in it. Now that sounds like a lot, but actually if you’re already doing user-centred design, you’re doing most of these steps already in your processes. All you would really need to do is to integrate the accessibility thinking in 8878 in the current steps in the current processes. If you’re not doing user-centred design already, actually you have a lot to benefit from starting to do that, because it won’t just help you create products that are going to work for your disabled and elderly audiences, it will actually help you to create products that will work better for all of your audiences. So this is a really good thing.

So, going very very quickly through the product process at the heart of BS8878, you can find more information in the slides later. So, the first stage, doing the right research and thought before you start. Defining the purpose of the product. Different products will have different accessibility challenges. Some will be very simple to get over, and not very costly. Others will be much more costly and potentially more difficult and require some R&D, something like that. Knowing the purpose of your product, very very important.

Secondly, defining its target audiences – is your product going to be used by a huge number of people who could be anybody, or will is only be used by the people on your intranet – if you’re a small company, you may only have a few people using you intranet, and they’ll be using assistive technology and technology that you have given them, that enables you to test with a much smaller range of technologies than you would if you were doing it for the general public, for instance.

Analyse the needs of the audiences for the product. How do disabled people and elderly people use the web? Well, hopefully Simon will have given you some idea about that, but how will they use your product, what will they be looking for from your product?

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Moving on to their platform or technology preferences, you might be interested to find out that a number of disabled people in fact, a growing body of disabled people are using Android smart phones as their mean – their only means – of getting to the web, because they can’t afford it any other way – it’s the cheapest way of getting online at the moment. What does that do? What does this information do to the decisions that you make later on in your project?

The relationship a product should have with it’s audiences… I’m going to skip over this one for now, but we can talk about it later on if you’d like.

The user goals and the tasks the product needs to provide, what are the most important goals to the people who come to your product to do? And if you can’t do everything for everybody, then how do you use the understanding of what goals are core, and what goals are not to prioritise your work around accessibility – it’s really important.

The second stage: making strategic choices based on the research you’ve done. The degree of user experience the product will aim to provide – how far are you going to go at trying to make the product accessible.

BS 8878 doesn’t tell you what you must do, it enables you to have options to say, this is the level, this is the degree that we think we can justify for the product that we are doing.

Inclusive design is what we’ve been talking about, but on occasions, different groups of disabled people, they have widely varying needs, differing needs for your product. Some examples here on the right, from the BBC Ouch, the BBC disability site, the example at the top is people with low vision, and the yellow and the blue are for people who are dyslexic. Now, you couldn't create one product to work for all of those people, as they have completely different needs in terms of the colour schemes. That is a user personalised approached – just one example of where this sort of thing could really help you out, if you needs… if your users have those needs.

The delivery platforms you will support – it’s crucial these days, thinking about mobiles, apps, all of those sorts of things. 8878 takes you through the accessibility implications of that. It also takes you through how you would choose target browsers, operating systems, and accessible technologies, assistive technologies to support – how are you going to be handling those, how you’re going to be testing with them, how you’re going to be handling the quirks and the differences that they have.

You’re probably going to not be creating this from scratch any more, in HTML, half the time you’re going to be using tools to create your product. A lot of the time you’re going to be procuring out the entire creation of the product to another supplier. How do you set the requirements and the contracts to make sure that they deliver on those aims that you’ve set in your accessibility policy?

Define the web technologies to be used. Are the technologies that are going to be used by your supplier or you’re going to choose for your creation of the product yourself going to enable you to create a product that’s accessible or not? How do you make those decisions?

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OK, the final part of the process - after we’ve made those strategic decisions – all about production, launch and maintenance. What sort of web guidelines should you use to direct your production, to make sure that it gives you the best chance of creating a product that is accessible? That’s where WCAG comes in.

Assuring the product’s accessibility though production – how are you going to test it? Are you going to do things that are low cost, that don’t give you a real reliance on the quality of the data coming back, whether disabled people will get an actual accessible user experience, or whether you’re going to do something like user testing, which will cost a lot more money, but is going to give you a much better assurance that disabled people and elderly people can actually use the product that you’ve created.

Working out what compromises you can launch with – and how to communicate those decisions and compromises to your audience is also key, because this is not a perfect world, a lot of the time you need a product out there right now, and you will have to make tough compromises on accessibility, for some of your audiences. You need to communicate that to them.

And then finally, how to assure accessibility as you go through it. Most products these days go through versions, that’s how you make sure that the product gets more accessible as it goes through versions rather than less accessible.

Fundamentally, what 8878 helps you deliver is those points 8 and 9 of that charter, that deliberate development lifecycle which is based on inclusive design from definition to delivery, we would say past the delivery, delivery of all of the versions of that product as well.

There’s more information on my Hassell Inclusion site, that’s the address that you can see on the screen there. There’s also a community that you can join, to ask questions in these sorts of areas. Talking about support, if you do want implementation support of BS8878, I’m very happy to help – that’s one of the things that my business does, so if you’d like more information, I’d be very happy to provide that for you. I’ve done this with a lot of organisations, with a lot of success so far.

Thankyou very much for your time, I look forward to answering some of those questions that maybe you have in mind now, or that you told Simon at the start of this call. Thank you.

SM

Thank you, very much, Jonathan, that was great – for those of you who are all calling and waiting, we have Jonathan on the line…

JH

Yes we do.

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SM Great – thank you Maddie for opening that up. So, as I said to all of you, we would like to hear from you, questions either by the right-hand screen, you can type them in, we can read them – or, obviously by telephone. So you can use the chat window – you can use it over the phone, press star 1 if you want to ask a question, and any technical problems just do star 0.

… I’m waiting to hear if any of you have any questions, I do have some pre-asked, so I’ll give you another 10 seconds or so, and I will start asking Jonathan some of the ones we’ve already had.

Operator

Thank you ladies and gentlemen, just a little reminder for you, if you do wish to ask a question please press star 1 on your telephone keypads now.

SM

OK, I suspect you’re being very shy at the moment, and that’s fine, but we would love to hear from you, I sound like a DJ now, I will move on to the first question.

This is kind of a broad one, my biggest challenge is trying to convince my department manager that the new website falls short… sorry, falls short of supporting people with disabilities. Not that this person’s technically minded, but their fear is they’re locking out a good number of customers and staff, and advice on getting the all-important senior buy-in?

Jonathan, I don’t know if you want to kick off on that?

JH

Sure, absolutely. Well hi everyone, sorry I couldn’t be with you in person to deliver the webinar, as I say I recorded that a couple of nights ago, but I’m in now from the train, so yes – how to get the important senior buy-in.

It’s crucial. The amount of organisation where the people who are interested and passionate about making sure their websites work for disabled people – they always tend to be quite junior people in those organisation and they always ask me a variant of this question. If you like, I don’t know Simon how much you went into the business case or around accessibility, but from my perspective…

SM

I did some of the statistics, but not the sort of more broader sense that you might perhaps…

JH

Yes, the important thing to get over is that there are a number of reasons why people have done it over time. Mostly, if we’re honest, it is about ultimately the legal imperative, so the Equality Act, used to be the Disability Discrimination Act, from my perspective most organisations who just looked at it as a law that they needed to

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make sure that they were protected from, as an insurance policy, were missing a trick, because there is a huge audience out there. 11 million people who may or may not be getting a good experience of your product, is quite a large figure. Effectively, it’s about 20% of the potential audience for any website in the UK, and when I talk to product managers, what I invariably do is to say something along the lines of ‘I’ve got 20% of your potential audience, who you may or may not be giving a good experience to – would you like to know something more about them?’

And then only when they come back with the affirmative, do I tell them that they’re elderly and disabled people – there’s still on occasions a tendency for people not to want to engage with the needs of these users because they are so different from the types of product managers that we have out there; I’ve yet to find that many disabled or elderly product managers, especially in the digital webspace. So yeah, getting the buy-in you have to go with the business case – for me, it’s all about the people who potentially could be using your site, contributing, becoming customers, who you may be missing, and actually it may not be that difficult to include them in your customer base, so that could really help the bottom line.

SM

Thanks Jonathan, that’s really good. I would just add a couple of bits – we have one quick question about ‘can I have a copy of the slides’ – we will… this is going to be recorded and we will be able to get you a copy of Jonathan’s slides as well, he’s made them available.

I completely I agree with you Jonathan, in terms of the business case – the only little specific I’d add on is, tell those people you’re trying to convince the broad or narrow definition of disability, what I mean by that is, they will think it’s all people using wheelchairs, and they may not actually have a lot of issues. So got to try and explain exactly those people with learning disabilities, visual impairment, motor neurological type things, cost versus benefit – it’s a tough call, because I don’t have absolute evidence, you know, if you do this you will get that back, but as we already saw the cost of making something accessible isn’t huge, especially if you’re thinking about it at the right time, but the benefit could be massive.

And the last bit, I totally agree with you, I would use the law a bit Jonathan, because I think that’s a good lever, but it’s always compatible with the PR bit, which is, if you get it wrong, do you want to be the company whose website excludes people with disabilities, or do you want to be the one who gets the pat on the back for being cool about it?

JH

If you like, the interesting thing is that, as I say BMI baby are being sued by the RNIB at the moment. The way I tend to talk about this these days is that BMIbaby have effectively already lost. Whether or not they win or lose that law suit, that fact that headlines about them are now in the whole space of ‘they don’t care about disabled people’ – that’s already a PR nightmare, and as I say if they’d have done the right thing, because they did know about a lot of the problems on their site, a long time before the law suit came along, it was just that they were very slow in putting in place

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solutions to those, If they’d have done, you know, engaged much better earlier, they wouldn’t have the PR problems that they have on their hands at the moment.

SM

OK, I think we have a real live question just come in Jonathan, from Helen, I’ll repeat this: ‘Jonathan mentioned during the presentation the difficultly of finding a solution that meets all different requirements’ – this is what Helen is struggling with both internally, with the intranet, and the internet. And just to add a little bit, because I was going to say this later, I do find people can be very good publically with their internet, but their intranet can be shocking in terms of accessibility. So, in essence, Helen’s question, Jonathan – how do you find a solution that meets all different requiremets?

JH

Yeah, intranets are in some ways potentially easier to make accessible to the audiences than a lot of external sites, because you have that information as to what sort of technology they’re using, those sorts of things, so, if you like, when it comes to an intranet, there’s less excuse because you know exactly who in your organisation will be using it, the sorts of needs that they have, because they’ve probably asked you to sort them out with some assistive technology, to help them be a good employee. So, you know a lot about their needs – you can test it with them, you can make sure everything works well, so if you like there’s lots of… that makes it easier.

The… it kind of comes down to the technologies that you’re using to create that intranet – so a lot of content management systems make that easy, to make an accessible intranet from it, others make it harder, so it depends on the content management system that you’ll have procured. And going back to the really important thing – if you put those things, if you have those accessibility requirements in mind when you did the initial procurement, then everything’s going to work nicely. If you didn’t then you have a real difficulty, because if you’ve already standardised on a product that doesn’t allow you to give the accessibility levels you would like for your users, then you’re in a real bind, because you then have to, if you like, prevail on the… on whether or not your supplier is happy to take the new requirements from you, and feed into their roadmap of the ???. So, yeah, it’s a… intranets, as long as you chose the technology right, you’re absolutely fine. If you haven’t, though, that can be very difficult.

SM

Thank you, Jonathan, Helen in a moment I’ll give you the, I’ll mention the Business Taskforce on Accessible Technology, which is part of the Employer’s Forum. The reason I’ll mention and give you the info is that this is bigger organisations, you may already be a member but if not your organisation will be a good one, my point being, they are pushing back to some of these software suppliers, all these big personnel management systems that might not be accessible, by the businesses pushing back, saying, we need accessibility it’s kind of good.

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But we do have a real life question on the telephone, so I’m hoping that Maddie can open that up and we can hear the question?

Operator

Yes of course, our question on the line is Steph Robinson, please go ahead with your question.

Caller

Hiya, I just wanted to ask, we've been talking a lot about different accessible technologies that we use, we’re talking about switches and things like that, and as a person that doesn’t use one of those technologies, I a bit in the dark really about how they work, and therefore how we can design websites that enable those – is there somewhere we can go to understand what the different range of technologies are, so that we can then understand how to work with each of them?

SM

Jonathan, I’ve got a couple of thoughts, did you want to kick of, or me?

JH

Yes, please go for it Simon, and I’ll chime in afterwards.

SM

Thanks Steph, and thanks for being brave enough for your real life voice. My best bet – and I might be a year or two out of date, but my best bet would be to go to an organisation called Abilitynet. If you haven’t heard of them already, essentially they’re a not-for-profit, awesome in terms of understanding different technologies, one of their primary things is that they will go and see individual people with disabilities, and come up with the right sort of kit that enables them to use computers and obviously the internet. So they have this huge, vast range of not only the stuff that they have but also knowledge, so Abilitynet, all one word, I would check them out. Obviously the bit I like about them is that they’re cross-impairment, you could obviously go to the RNIB, we’ve already mentioned that, but Abilitynet is across the board, so they would be quite a good start. I don’t know, Jonathan if you’ve got anybody to help?

JH

Yes, so Abilitynet are great. Probably just one thing to flag up there, if that when I was at the BBC I actually worked with Abilitynet to come up with a site called My Web My Way, which… so, if you don’t want to go and visit Abilitynet where they are, then you can go online, so it’s on bbc.co.uk/accessibility. If you go there, there is a site that Abilitynet and I created, quite a while ago now, but it’s gone through various different versions. The idea is that there’s already probably software on your computer that will help most disabled people in some way. So there are settings in the operating system, there are settings in pretty much most browsers. There are different assistive technologies that you could buy, and there’s information on there

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about those. So yes, if you go to bbc.co.uk/accessibility, then you can get a primer. There’s also video on there of people using those technologies, so you can get an idea of the types of experiences they are having, and why the guidelines have been written as they have – you know, you can start understanding why if you code a site in a particular way, somebody using a particular assistive technology will have either a good experience or a bad one. So yeah, I’d say that was probably a first port of call, and then, yes, if you want more information Abilitynet are fabulous.

Caller

That’s great, thank you

JH

You’re welcome.

SM

Thank you Steph, thank you Jonathan, oh one last bit – the joy of two people answering questions – you’ve got occupational health. Most of you are pretty big organisations, your occupational health teams should be familiar, maybe not to the level of Abilitynet, but they should know stuff and bit of kit that can be good for people with disabilities in the workplace.

We have another question – Maddie, could you link us up with the next question on the telephone line?

Operator

Yes of course. So our next question comes from the line of Tony Loyd. Please go ahead with your question.

Tony Loyd

My question is, why is the whole subject defined in terms of accessibility, rather than usability? Because one of the things that I’m very conscious of is that if you make a website more accessible, it becomes more usable generally and therefore increases overall use of a website, and also people’s productivity. Those people might not be disabled, and yet the advantages in having an accessible website will play to those and is also probably within usability rather than accessibility because accessibility tends to be shown in terms of social responsibility, whereas usability is more aligned with producing what is best for the user and best for the organisation.

SM

Thank you Tony, if I understood that right you’re kind of saying, why are we defining this in terms of disability and presumably impairment, where it should be more about usability, you know, inclusive or universal design type principles, and obviously productivity, and social responsibility. Maybe if I do one minute or something, then Jonathan you might want to pick up as well.

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I agree with you in principle, absolutely, but my reality is, I still think there is a huge amount of websites that are not accessible, and people don’t even think about this. So my bit is, I think you sometimes still need the lever of the legislation, you need the sort of encouragement of the business case, just to get them to twig that it’s actually an issue. Forgive me, but I am completely in agreement with you usability, productivity, inclusive design – but people can be sometimes a little bit airy-fairy, they want the hard facts, as it were, to kind of kick start the action. Once they get that, a lot of organisations twig exactly what you said, which is, ‘well hang on, if we get this right, it will be great for everybody, we’re not leaving anybody behind… and it will just be a much more pleasurable experience’. But sometimes I thinks it’s just that carrot and stick… but I take your point, I do take your point, I just think sometimes people need a bit of clarity to get their heads round what the single issue is. I don’t know, Jonathan, you may have a different take, or an add-on?

JH

Probably just an add-on, so I completely agree that usability is the thing that we should be aiming for, accessibility is a word that I only use because it’s been used in the industry for so long. You know, my job at the BBC was to bring usability and accessibility together, and actually that’s one of the things that BS8878 distinguishes itself from, from all of the other accessibility standards out there. Most accessibility standards, if you like, only really cater for the needs of disabled people, and what you would need to try and cater for those needs. Standards like BS8878 integrate those accessibility concerns into a process for creating websites that are effective and usable by everybody. And fundamentally, in step 7 of 8878, it talks about whether or not you are going to… you know, what lengths you are going to go to to make sure that your product is going to be usable by everybody, and accessible is the lowest of our levels. We then have usable above that, and what we would term ‘satisfying’ above that – so whether or not you would want to revisit that side, whether or not you had an experience you would actually like to repeat.

So yes, from my perspective, it’s actually what distinguishes 8878 from the rest of the world really, because if you go to America, its very much about, you know, coding in the right way, and doing things that may or may not, in the final analysis, actually help disabled people use the website you’ve created. Whereas 8878, especially with its emphasis on suggesting that people test the resulting website with real disabled and elderly users, to see if they can actually use it. If you like, it’s taking what you’re saying, and saying right, this is the right way of doing things, and making sure that the reality of what we’ve created is actually going to be helpful to everybody.

SM

Thank you Jonathan. I’m really sorry to say, we are bang out of time – I hope that was of some sort of comfort Tony, we do take on your point. The principle is absolutely right.

One last slide, if I could just give or a couple or a few websites – obviously the employers forum, there is a sub page called accessible websites, and carries a lot of this information. I already mentioned, in response to Helen’s question, the taskforce

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on accessibility, and I like the principles of what they’re about there, and the charter that Jonathan spoke about in his presentation.

The Web Accessibility Initiative, the worldwide one which we’ve mentioned, and also the British Standards which Jonathan’s just picked up on at the end there, the BS8878.

As I understand it, these slides will be available afterwards, and can be sent out, or have a word with the events team, which I mentioned at the very beginning.

If you’re interest, we’ve got a couple of events coming up, Autism and Asperger’s telephone tutorial – that’s the 12th of June, and the following day is an actual conference – going back to old-school face-to-face there. Hosted by Microsoft, it’s the 13th of June, 10am to 4 O’clock. If you want to come, there’s the information, events@efd.org.uk, and you can also book it over the web.

That is it, so all that remains for me to say is thank you very much for calling in. I hope it’s been useful as well as – what’s the right word, maybe not accessible but… pleasurably usable for you. Appreciate your questions – obviously this is probably a taster and you will want to follow up, by all means come back to the Forum, to Jonathan or myself, and thank you very much for joining in.

JH

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you ladies and gentlemen, for joining today’s conference. You may now replace your handsets. Thank you.

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