While the need to deliver IT services that meet accessibility guidelines is not new, recent legislation as well as experiences of the past 18 months have demonstrated that University staff and students expect to use online resources with a variety of devices, making full use of accessibility features such as reflow, captions, and text-to-speech. For University IT departments this brings many challenges: How can we respond to these expectations? Do we need a policy? What about our processes? Will these need to change? Most University IT departments support a large number of services. The legislation, sets very high goals, but what is achievable with limited resources? BUT there are many opportunities. An important part of accessibility is helping all users to understand and use accessibility features. Accessibility skills are in-demand among employers, so developing such skills in our IT staff is a great opportunity. Adjusting our processes and practices, for example by annotating wireframes for accessibility, or building an accessible component library can bring efficiencies, allowing us to create new services and sites that are accessible first, and delivering an improved user experience. We do need to be realistic - when procuring or developing new services there are may be obstacles to providing a fully accessible experience. We will show you methods for prioritising accessibility defects and taking ownership of accessibility. We have the opportunity to develop IT services that are “Accessible by design”. We can’t deny that an institution-wide approach is ideal.  It helps us to secure a mandate, budget,  and buy-in from the University executive. But IT departments have particular attributes… they are responsible for most, if not all, of the University’s digital estate, so implementing technical solutions that meet accessibility guidelines can only really be done by the IT department. They tend to be embedded within their institution, touching almost all aspects, and are often looked to for leadership. IT department can have is a significant impact, and they have the chance to act now. In this presentation we will share some background to put accessibility trends in context, and introduce you to a pathway for implementing digital accessibility within your IT department. We’ll share practical examples of how accessibility can be embedded within the policies and processes of an HE IT department. But we won’t have all the answers – we’re all at different stages of this journey but as a community we can share practices and progress. Before we get into the main part of our presentation, let’s consider some of the context of Digital Accessibility. Students may disclose that they have disability at application, enrolment, or at any other time during their time at a University. Disabled students now make up a sizeable minority of the student population: in 2018-19, more than one in every eight students studying in England declared at least one disability. This data is only part of the picture as many students will not show in the official data. Many students may exhibit a range of challenges which are undiagnosed.  Some students are reluctant to disclose a disability or impairment for a variety of reasons. In their 2022 – 2025 strategy consultation document, one of the two areas of focus for the Office for students is “equality of opportunity”. The OFS will be expecting Universities to demonstrate how “Students’ access, success and progression are not limited by their background, location or characteristics.” Of course, we must consider all users of our services, our staff, our visitors, prospective students and so on, Worldwide, statistics show that 15% of the world population has a disability, 28% have a visual impairment. Accessibility affects all of us, everyone will experience some kind of disability or impairment at some point in our lives. But accessibility isn’t only about supporting those with a disability or impairment. Accessible practices benefit everyone. Do the users of your services report that they find them frustrating or “clunky”? Research has found that the top four “web frustrations” map to accessibility issues. These 4 issues were considered more important than poor performance or bugs. For example being interrupted during your workflow. Or poor user experience, for example when you know something you want is on the a web site, but you don’t remember which navigation path to follow and there is no site map. Or frustrations from trying to view content on mobile but having to scroll around because the site doesn’t reflow properly. Or being asked to re-enter the repeated details during a single workflow. As Steve Krug wrote in his book “Don’t make me think”, ‘A website is not usable unless it is accessible.” Integrating accessibility into our workflows is a foundation for improved user experience. 






Increasingly we have opportunities to normalise and expand the benefits of accessible practises to all and explain the wider benefits. Nicola Yap, a Technical Writer for Google Cloud, has written that we should reframe accessibility as customisation. Accessibility features can benefit everyone. It’s important to explain these benefits to our user-population so that they can make more effective use of our services. Jamie Gruman, a professor of organisational behaviour at Ontario’s University of Guelph, has written about the expectation of employees to be taken care of, not just as employees, but as people. By ensuring our services are accessible and explaining the benefits of accessibility features we can improve the well-being of our user community for example through explaining how to use keyboard navigation to as a way to avoid mouse-related Musculo-Skeletal absences, or explaining how to set Outlook to read emails aloud to reduce eye strain or cognitive fatigue. Emphasising our accessibility credentials can help us appeal to those who are not yet part of the organisation. Research shows that the more diverse an organisation the more likely it will out-perform, but how can we foster that diversity unless our services are accessible? We mentioned earlier that we presenters are all at different stages on this journey, and it’s fair to say that we are all very far meeting our goals and objectives within digital accessibility. So the research done in putting this presentation together is as much for our own benefit as for our audience. We identified several possible pathways to follow for embedding digital accessibility within our policies and processes. We found that the World-wide web consortium’s Planning and Managing Web Accessibility guide was a straightforward and digestible approach to implementing digital accessibility within an organisation. It breaks down the path through four steps, starting with initiate, where we develop our understanding of accessibility and build organisational enthusiasm, then planning, where we develop clear goals and an environment that supports accessibility. Then comes implementation, where staff are trained, tools are available, and accessibility is included throughout our processes. Perhaps most important is sustain, this involves keeping momentum, for example by continual accessibility monitoring, adapting to new technologies and changes to standards, and incorporating feedback from users.


Each of the steps has a discrete set of activities. In the full presentation we explain all of these and relate to them to the context of a University IT Department. During the rest of this hour we’re going to concentrate on what we believe will be most important and valuable for you. We will discuss learning the basics, developing the business case, gathering support, creating a policy and determining budget and responsibilities, reviewing our environment, integrating goals into polices and prioritising issues. We will also run through an overview of the recommendations for sustaining these activities. The whole W3C guide is available online and the link is available on our presentation support website. Now we're going to hand over to Matt, he's going to start talking about the first stage in this process.