It’s likely you’ve heard about accessibility before now, but you might not know what it means, what it entails or even how to do it in the digital realm.
Don’t worry, Nationwide’s newly established digital accessibility team is here to help make accessibility that little bit less daunting, by providing resources, guidance and training for all disciplines across the business.
So let’s start with the two most important questions, what is accessibility and why does it matter so much?
Accessibility, in a nutshell
At its heart, accessibility is about enabling people. When it comes to digital it’s about making our products and services easier to use, no matter what someone’s situation, ability or circumstance.
In some cases, it can be making things possible that were once deemed impossible, it can be giving someone their independence, for example giving someone who can’t easily leave their house (a situation we all find ourselves in of late) the ability to manage their finances or do their weekly shopping.
It’s estimated that 13.3 million people in the UK live with a disability, making it more important than ever to ensure people have equal access to digital services. Many people think about accessibility as helping those with low vision or those who are blind to access the Internet but people with visual impairments actually make up a small percentage of those who need support online. That’s not to say we don’t need to support these types of disabilities, but that we should also be mindful that there are other types of disabilities that affect a huge number of people. For example, cognitive disabilities are often far-reaching and cover a number of different conditions such as dyslexia, attention deficits, short term memory loss and autism amongst others. People with speech, auditory and physical disabilities also need consideration when designing and building digital services.
Guidelines called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to describe how to make web content accessible to people with disabilities. These guidelines can be used by digital teams to understand the various ways of making content available to everyone. While they are not the easiest documents to understand (even some accessibility specialists struggle with them), they are often the benchmark used to rate how well an organisation is performing in terms of accessibility.
Why is accessibility important for everyone?
Given the global challenges we are facing at the moment, the need for accessible online services could not be more essential. All of us will be affected by disability in our lifetime, whether individually, through colleagues, family or friends or by circumstance. Creating digital products and services that enable people with disabilities and older people to live full and enriching lives will not only benefit them but will help our future selves as well.
As well as being the right thing to do for everyone, there are the legal and regulatory aspects of accessibility to take into account.
Since the introduction of the 2010 Equality Act (and the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act before) there has been a legal obligation to ensure websites can be accessed by people with disabilities. In the act, a website is classed as a “service” and “services” must make reasonable adjustments to accommodate people with disabilities.
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and other regulatory bodies are focusing more on accessibility as part of their efforts to protect vulnerable customers. Half of adults in the UK (25.6 million people) are susceptible to becoming vulnerable and with older people often struggling to understand digital communication services it’s vitally important to ensure Nationwide digital services are “accessible by default”.
Case study: Domino’s pizza
Interestingly, there is no case law surrounding accessibility in the UK. That’s not to say people aren’t complaining or raising issues relating to accessibility, it’s that many of these cases are settled out of court, as the reputational damage a disability discrimination court case could bring against an organisation could be disastrous.
If you aren’t familiar with the American legal system, you may be surprised to know there are thousands of legal cases in progress regarding web accessibility. Most recent is the case involving Domino’s Pizza. A customer sued Dominos for violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act because he wasn’t able to build and order a customized pizza on their mobile app or website when using a screen reader. The Court upheld his case saying:
Domino’s website and app facilitate access to the goods and services of a place of public accommodation—Domino’s physical restaurants. They are two of the primary (and heavily advertised) means of ordering Domino’s products to be picked up at or delivered from Domino’s restaurants. We agree with the district court in this case—and the many other district courts that have confronted this issue in similar contexts—that the ADA applies to Domino’s website and app, which connect customers to the goods and services of Domino’s physical restaurants.
What we can learn from this:
The Dominoes case shows how seriously some people are willing to fight against inaccessibility. The cost to Dominoes to rectify their website and app to make it accessible wasn’t a huge amount of money (in the region of $38,000), but the costs of appealing to the Supreme Court in the USA was far higher. However, the most significant cost is the damage this case has done to their brand and their reputation. People are thinking twice about buying pizza from a company that discriminates against those with disabilities.
The main thing we can learn from this case is that while the legal and regulatory risk is a good reason to make sure Nationwide products and services are accessible by default, it’s the damage to our reputation that is very much at stake.
First steps on our accessibility journey
“The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide you’re not going to stay where you are.” – JP Morgan
We want teams at Nationwide to create accessible experiences by default. If you create products with different types of people in mind, you end up with products that are not only useful and easy for everyone to use – but also ones that inspire and delight (such as Xbox Adaptive Controllers accessible packaging or Oxo’s Good Grips).
Nationwide is at the beginning of its accessibility journey and we’ve seen some good progress so far. Our mobile banking app (iOS) meets Level AA accessibility, new journeys for the Everyday Banking Hub (CCO and Flexone) will be launching to Level AA standard on desktop, ongoing development for OSA has addressed a number of accessibility defects, and a huge amount of work has gone into the Future Web project to ensure a high standard of accessibility for the launch of Nationwide.co.uk later this year.
We’ve set up a permanent Digital Accessibility team to provide on-going support for our colleagues, enabling them to not only create products and services that are accessible for everyone, but to maintain levels of accessibility.
So far our team has:
- Created the Nationwide Accessibility Standard
- Established the Accessibility Governance forum
- Created the Designing for Everyone website (the site you are reading now!)
- Trained almost 150 colleagues on Accessibility Basics
- Providing ad hoc support and guidance to accessibility requests from colleagues across the business
- Established an accessibility champions network
We know there is still a long way to go to make our products and services accessible for everyone. Much of our digital estate isn’t yet accessible to our members with disabilities, and that this leaves us open to both legal and regulatory risk. So what’s next?
What’s next for accessibility at Nationwide?
The accessibility team will be focusing on providing education and training for our delivery teams and supporting and advising colleagues where required.
We will be:
- Raising awareness of the Accessibility Team across the business (in articles like this one)
- Building up the resources and content in the Designing for Everyone website
- Establishing accessibility training programmes for different disciplines (UX, UI, content, dev & QA)
- Developing the accessibility champions programme (initially in Service & Experience Design)
- Working closely with the NEL team to ensure our design language is accessible to all
Where to begin when thinking about accessibility
You might think that accessibility sounds like a daunting task and you aren’t wrong. There is a great deal to understand and implement. However, once you get into accessibility, you realise how much of a difference you can make to someone’s life by thinking inclusively.
When learning anything new, take it easy and start at the beginning. You soon figure out the areas that interest you the most and those that don’t. For instance, you may be interested in the legal side of accessibility such as civil right laws, procurement laws, industry-specific laws and governance, or maybe disability concepts and etiquette is more your thing, learning about assistive technologies will open your eyes to how people use the web, or if you are more technically inclined, you may want to dive straight into the code.
Whatever it may be, you’ll soon realise that accessibility will change the way you think about digital services for years to come.
Thank you for your feedback