TO ADD: Hassell book notes

 

Hassell (2019)

The reality is that many organisations commitment to inclusion and accessibility often doesn’t line up to their words and their staff aren’t trained to live out the commitment and projects fail (p.48).

It is clear that if accessibility is important today, it will only get more important over the coming years as the number of people with impairments in the aging population who wish to use digital products will grow (p.54).

The business case for accessibility is the ethical business case. The basis of this is the assertion that it is unethical or contrary to human rights to unnecessarily exclude disabled people from the benefits of modern digital technologies that increase their ability to live independently and be fully engaged members of society (p.63).

Some money spent on making a digital product accessible during its development can save you lots of money once it’s launched in terms of minimising complaints and lower the cost and time of building accessibly rather than retrofitting it in as a response to customer feedback (p.74).

Accessibility is so much more than legal risk insurance (p.82).

Accessibility is often portrayed as something complex, which requires continual advice, even dependency on expert accessibility specialists often from external suppliers (p.85).

One way organisations handle accessibility is they ignore it, then it’s all hands to the pump on remediation if anyone complains. You need to fix the problems in the process not the product to prevent the reoccurring, otherwise you are placing a temporary band aid rather than fixing or seeing to it properly (p.86).

Sometimes organisations do well, but often this is likely because they are lucky enough to have an ‘accessibility superhero’ on their staff. A superhero is passionate, committed and energetic. Sometimes this person gets promoted as the ‘accessibility champion’ making them responsible for making all of the products accessible. Using just one enthusiast person is yet another band aid and this superhero is likely to burn out and may leave to go elsewhere (p.87).

Depending on one person for any competency around accessibility is foolhardy. No organisation that considers a competency essential allows it to reside in a single point of failure or burnout, this model does not scale (p.87)

To achieve efficiency and scalability, you need to embed competence throughout an organisation in policies, processes and staff (p.90)

You need to look at what job roles within your organisation have an impact on the creation or procurement of digital products and content (p.90).

Different roles play their part and each needs to do their job right, for example the batton of accessibility can be passed on in a bad state with poor decisions being made, or decisions based on poor assumptions from incomplete user research, or passed on through a persons lack of knowledge and this can break an effective implementation of accessibility (p.91).

The experienced and knowledgeable people in an organisation who know most about accessibility might have their time as a resource manipulated and hindered by those a level above them (p.93).

Accessibility is facilitated or constrained by many people in digital production teams, but most notably by the teams project manager (p.94).

Embedding accessibility into the way all people work can be daunting, because what is being talked about here is organisational change, which is often one of the most difficult things to do (p.96).

There are two ways to motivate people to see how accessibility is something that concerns them, first is motivating staff directly by training them and second is to motivate those high up in the business to understand the benefits. The first of these gains a greater and deeper level of but-in (p.101).

Hand in hand with motivation goes responsibility, the ISO  30071-1 requires a department or specified role to be responsible for the organisation’s compliance with standards and regulations. These people are different to the superhero model in that they are given the power to drive motivation and an organisational approach (p.103).

WCAG unfortunately is structured as a large number of success criteria around technical categories rather than the job roles of people who need to work with them, so people then have to read them all which makes accessibility feel overwhelming and complex (p.109).

Start by giving all of your digital production teams training to make accessibility about real people, not guidelines (p.109).

Next find a way of getting your teams the most appropriate training and guidelines for the digital products they create (p.111).

Just giving people WCAG doesn’t work if they are creating things like native apps or documents (p.111).

Guidelines need to be as concise as possible and be easy to digest, and follow this by breaking down guidance by job role and convert any complex language into simpler language (p.112).

Accessibility needs to become less about testing things to find out what people got wrong and more about training people to get things right from the start and that helps build confidence in teams and organisations (p.113).

Do not send your staff on general accessibility courses, send them on specific courses for their roles and for their own specific responsibilities.

We have found that most people have a patchy understanding of how accessibility should impact their job, having picked up bits of knowledge over the years from the internet, or the results from audits without anyone fully connecting the dots (p.114).

Adopt a user-centred approach to your training design, ensuring that all your accessibility training is relevant to staff needs by asking them what challenges come up time and time again to be able to specify the targeted training they require and get your staff applying their new knowledge as soon as possible (p.117).

My experience is that most large organisations do best when they train all their staff in the basics of accessibility, and train them to identify the circumstances when they need more support (p.118).

There are often discrepancies between the wording of an accessibility policy and what actually happens day in day out in the organisations that have them. If information, guidance and direction sits in only one document it is reasonably easy for it to get overlooked (p.132).

Some places get bogged down by technical issues one by one that they neglect the fundamental strategic aspects of project governance, like doing their user research and testing (p.132)

Ensuring that your disabled users are able to complete that full journey, through different levels of accessibility provided by each site and service they need to navigate, is so much more important than if one image on the journey is missing it’s alt text (p.133).

Accessibility monitoring tools and dashboards are worthless if management are insufficiently bought into the importance of accessibility to hold staff accountable when they neglect to deliver the right degrees of quality and user testing, or potentially deny a product’s sign off for launch if accessibility is deficient (p.139).

What my colleagues couldn’t understand was why accessibility guidelines in the web space were a technical checklist, when everything that they had learnt about inclusive design was about understanding user needs, encapsulating them in personas and using those personas to inform all stages of an iterative design process (p.145).

If we do not embed accessibility in the development lifecycle at process level, we will keep trying and failing (p.147).

Blindly following accessibility guidelines may feel like the tail wagging the dog (p.150).

Accessibility is more than just guidelines (p.161).

To keep up to date it is worth being part of a community where advances in accessibility are discussed and shared, this could be via an email list, twitter, social media groups and forums (p.184).

Organisations often spend budgets in inefficient places, such as on audits rather than training, only providing short term fixes when investing in staff will make it easier and cheaper to sustain in the long term (p.185).

Good accessibility experts are still relatively rare and hard to recruit (p.187).

If we want to innovate and add value to people’s lives, why aren’t we focusing more of our attention on designing for those with frequently overlooked needs. I, like Microsoft and many others, think that if we go this, the world will be a much better place, for all of us (p.191).

As the demand grows, we need to train more people in accessibility (P.195).

There are simply not yet enough accessibility consultants in the UK, for example, to be able to test and fix the estimated 70% of websites that aren’t accessible.

The time has gone where we could get away with web accessibility as an add-on or niche.

For us to ensure we design for our future selves, we must make accessibility a key value at the heart of every digital product we create, alongside privacy, security, stability and availability. We must make it ‘just the way we do things’ for each person to play their part, consistently, repeatedly in making products accessible. Or else the technology the generation after us creates may exclude us too (p.198).