#AccessibilityToMe - Episode Three [V3].mov.mp4

You can make a lot of people happier, more independent,

and that's never a bad thing for a brand to want to be able to support,

that says a lot about a brand's reputation when that's the attitude that they take.

For someone like me it's the difference between

having a job and not having a job.

Or getting mainstream education or not getting mainstream education.

My name is Lee Davies.

I'm currently working as a

Junior Accessibility Consultant for HMRC

within the CDIO departments.

I lost my vision at the age of 10

and thanks to a lot of help that was

available at the time, I was able to remain in mainstream

education using assistive technology, such as Jaws.

The main thing will be it opens yourself up to a much wider market.

There are probably more blind users than people are aware of.

And if a blind or partially sighted user cannot access your service,

then you are cutting yourself off from that area of the market.

I think the number that I heard recently was that there are currently 1600 blind

or visually impaired people working for HMRC at the moment or all

across the country, and that is quite a large percentage.

I am Breandan Ward.

I'm 42.

I think overall, universal access

is such a powerful

philosophy, if you like,

because it, what it means, and inclusive design,

to use the term in the UK.

Inclusive design means that we are more and more aware

that information is accessed

in different ways by people based on their different needs.

I'll give an example,

without a name, of a supermarket chain.

Every single time I go to the website, it works like a dream.

It's fully accessible.

So do you see what I mean in terms of the resonance there?

I can tell that what that company says about diversity and including all

the customers isn't just words, because I get exactly the same experience

physically in the shop as I do in the virtual world online.

And that's essentially why I only shop there and I encourage all my blind,

and partially sighted friends to shop there and everyone who will listen!

My name is Bryn Anderson and I'm

an Accessibility Specialist

working in the retail sector.

The thing that often

gets forgotten about is this idea of autonomy, right?

So when I am autonomous in

a world that I'm so often

not able to be autonomous, right.

Because the bus numbers are too small and the timetable is too small because

I haven't been factored into those solutions, that when I get this sense

of autonomy, it actually runs way deeper or it runs deep.

We can just say it runs deep.

So there's that sense of empowerment and autonomy can be had doing really

mundane things, like going to the supermarket.

But the sort of fulfilment it can bring is really, really powerful.

And so, you know, who doesn't want to go back for another, for a bit more

autonomy in a world which is so often not,

or in a world that you cannot often be autonomous.

My name is Christian Pererra

I'm an Accessibility Consultant,

being one now for over 10 years.

There are several business cases,

or several cases for accessibility.

There's obviously the business case which

stops you getting sued

and makes sure that your products are available to everybody.

In terms of affordance.

I mean, you're looking at the costs being

up front and part of the process, instead of it being at the end of the process or

in the middle, where you can pay more money for consultancy companies to come in.

In terms of users, you're making sure, like I said,

that your product is available to everyone.

Not having bad press out there for your company is also a big thing.

I know some companies get slammed quite a lot

in the public domain for many reasons.

Accessibility being one of them.

You want to make sure that customers can

use your product, otherwise they're going to go to other companies.

My name's Craig Abbott.

I'm currently the Head of Accessibility at DWP.

I think the benefits of getting it right are

meeting the needs of your user base.

I mean, if you've got, you know, especially for someone like DWP where

we provide a lot of services to vulnerable people,

it's the benefits of making things accessible

are that you can provide that service to more people.

There's a lot of focus on the benefits being legally compliant and there's a lot

of focus on the risks that come with not being compliant.

But I think the benefits are, you know, i t's one, doing the right thing.

It's making sure that people can use your services and then it's the benefits of

people, then trusting the service and people not kind of having negative

experiences and that kind of tarnishing the reputation of the department.

I think we should be focussing on the fact that

we're doing the right thing and by making the services inclusive

then we can allow people to get access to the services that they need.

So that we're fulfilling our duty as a public sector body.

I'm Andie Jordan,

I'm the Digital Accessibility Officer

at Herefordshire Council.

You're alienating a massive

audience by not making your content accessible.

And working in the public sector,

the people that you're most trying

to reach are those people that are

vulnerable, who may have

trouble accessing information.

And by making your information accessible,

you can actually change people's lives.

They're able to access that information,

maybe for the first time,

that they've not had access to.

Maybe it's the first time that they're

able to access that information

independently without having to rely

on somebody else to relay

that information to them.

So I think for public sector it is actually

crucial because, you know,

you can ultimately change people's lives

by providing them with information

they never knew was there previously.

I'm Léonie Watson.

I'm founder and director of Tetralogical.

I've been working on the Web

for nearly 25 years.

And most of that time in accessibility.

The benefits are that a lot of people,

myself included, get to do a lot more of what they want to do with,

you know, the websites and the apps that they want to use.

A very good example, we

experience a difficult time as the world at the moment.

In many countries, people are not able to leave the house

to get out to do banking, grocery shopping, clothes shopping,

any number of commo n activities. And inaccessible websites,

quite simply, stop us from doing that as easily as we should be able to.

Conversely, if I flip it the other way,

I found a Chinese supermarket in Bristol where I live.

They have the most amazing accessible website.

I tweeted about it.

I've got a fair few thousand followers on Twitter.

It got a lot of replies and comments

and they engaged with the conversation on Twitter.

Just because they got accessibility r ight,

they've received a fair amount of public press,

a good number of social media engagements, all that kind of thing.

My name is Jon Gibbons and

I'm a Digital Accessibility Consultant

of about 15 years.

So accessibility I see as a human right.

It's something that we

as a population should have access to, equal access to, information and services.

But accessibility is about more than protecting yourself from legal action.

It's about more than the financial

return on investment, which studies have shown to be favourable.

And I think that work done with accessibility in mind,

whatever sector you are in, results in improvements for everybody, regardless of disability.

And it can help you locate issues with your product that would

have, you might have otherwise missed.

We some times test our products with users,

but we don't test them with disabled people.

And disabled people make up

15 to 20 percent of the world's population.

It can also be, historically it's been,

a driver for innovation and it's an opportunity for improving your

brand, something that's controlled by your consumers, not by your organisation.

There are other benefits,

improvements to search engine optimisation and things like that.

Some of the case studies that we see have measured a multitude of other benefits

from employing accessibility in your processes.

I am proud that the people I have trained have

told me that I have changed

the way that they think about accessibility.

And I think business loses its humanity easily

and changing the way that people and businesses

think of accessibility and disability

pays unseen dividends for people.

And you may not know what those paybacks are

until you've done them,

because your business is different to eveyone else's.