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Embedding Accessibility with BS 8878

Introduction

Digital Accessibility is often a misunderstood concept.

It isn’t just a way of protecting yourself from being sued by coding your website according to a standards tick-list so it works with screenreaders.

It’s about working to ensure your website, intranet, widget, workplace application, mobile site, mobile app, or IPTV app is able to be used by as many people in its target audiences as possible.

It’s about recognising that no product is ever going to be usable to all users, and finding a reasonable, justifiable way of balancing the resource costs of inclusion against the benefits. And it’s about letting your users know when you’ve not been able to fully support their needs.

Fundamentally, it’s about understanding the challenges of inclusion, and solving them in creative ways, to gain a bigger audience so you product is more successful.

Tips

• Be motivated by the benefits of inclusion: increased reach, minimised complaints & legal risk, CSR.
• Appoint someone in your organisation to be ultimately responsible for it and champion it.
• Ensure that all members of staff know how their job can impact the inclusion of the products they create and are trained and empowered to make justifiable decisions and document them.
• Don’t just do accessibility on projects, identify all your business-as-usual processes that could impact on the inclusion of your products and ensure they uphold it.
• Require that all product development projects follow the BS 8878 user-centred production process & maintain a Product Accessibility Policy.
• Ensure you are clear on the purpose of the product and its target audiences.
• Do the best real-world user-research you can at the start of projects to help good decision making.
• Where users’ needs diverge, feel free to use product variations and personalisation to help them.
• Follow the best-practice technical, design and authoring guidelines for the platform you are developing on (and ensure these harmonise with WCAG 2.0).
• User-test your products iteratively during their production, testing for usability with non-disabled and disabled participants together, to the level your budget will allow.
• Where you decide that creating a fully accessible v1 is not reasonable, let your audience clearly know any accessibility deficiencies and when you estimate they will be fixed (and live up to the estimate).

• Buy BS 8878 – contact jonathan@hassellinclusion.com for a 10% discount
• Sign up to receive ‘Implementing BS8878’ blogs
• Join the community
• Training and consultancy for embedding available
   

Courtesy of:
Jonathan Hassell, Director, Hassell Inclusion