Accessibility
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Part of our mission is to empower organisations to be more inclusive, so producing accessible products and services is what we’re all about. Everyone should be able to use a product or service in a satisfactory and efficient way. And the more accessible a product or service is, the more people will be able to use the service successfully.
Good accessibility means making sure that what users are seeing and interacting with can be readily perceived, is easy to understand and use, and is coded in an accessible manner so that assistive technology works seamlessly. The easiest way to deliver services that work for everyone is to build with accessibility in mind throughout the project – from concept to completion.
Our in-house accessibility team provides a range of services from project initiation to post-project reviews. Depending on the project stage, they can do:
Accessibility audits
Manage testing and/or subject matter expertise
Ad-hoc accessibility consultation through clinics and ‘live’ audits
Mentoring and training
Component accessibility reviews
Accessibility statement writing, including a roadmap of any future plans to improve accessibility
Clients' requirements vary enormously. They may need a full accessibility audit of a live product, service or website where we highlight challenges and make recommendations. In other instances, we might be working on a project with a client to deliver a service and need an accessibility specialist's evaluation of a specific component that we plan to build.
Whatever the needs, we flex our offering to best support the client while championing the importance of accessibility.
At NEC Digital Studio, our accessibility specialists act as consultants who oversee all aspects of accessibility on our products and projects. But they do not work alone, as we also have a team of accessibility champions in many departments across the business. Our champions have a vested interest in ensuring that everything we design and build at NEC Digital Studio is accessible.
They are trained to advise project teams on a variety of different front-end and back-end elements of the service, as well as physical accessibility for the non-digital elements of a service. The champions' involvement assures clients that accessibility is at the forefront of our designs at all times. Having the champions embedded in our delivery means we have representation at every phase of the project lifecycle and produce more usable and inclusive services.
A vital part of delivering accessible services is understanding the full breadth of the users’ needs. This is why we conduct our research and design with a variety of people with a range of different accessibility needs.
The Research Operations and User Research team are experts at recruiting and working with people with specific access needs. We know how to reach out to the right people and how to welcome them into a physical space or best prepare for an online meeting. Our usual practice always considers building breaks into meetings and offering questions in advance for people to prepare answers. We also offer additional support where required, such as making sure physical spaces are wheelchair accessible or we have the right technology for people to engage with on the day.
For us, it’s all about providing options. We allow participants to direct us with their needs so we can help guide our clients to make informed decisions about their services. And armed with relevant insights, together we design and deliver the right thing.
We have regular touchpoints throughout the delivery lifecycle to help build accessibility into our products and services. From weekly accessibility clinics where anyone in NEC Digital Studio is welcome to raise queries and ask for support through to monthly accessibility tech talks where our specialist and developers get together to discuss latest best practice for accessibility.
At NEC Digital, accessibility is baked into everything we do for three key reasons:
Ethical
Legal
Financial
Ethically, accessibility is all about inclusion. Designing and building accessible services is about making them available to and useable by all users, regardless of ability. The more people who can access a product or service, the more widely it will be used. This helps our clients to reach further and enables better support and services for their users.
Legally, all media such as websites and mobile applications in the UK need to meet the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018 (PSBAR), as well as the requirements of the Equality Act of 2010. UK websites and apps must be compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.2 AA). WCAG 2.2 AA is a universal standard for accessible online services. It outlines criteria that are designed to make services perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. We comply with the regulations, not simply to fulfill our legal obligations, but because we believe in removing barriers that might prevent people from accessing essential information and services.
Beyond legal requirements, we also work in line with different guidelines. A key example is the Government Digital Service (GDS) principles which are particularly important when working with government bodies but also feed into our work with private and third sector clients too. There is a large crossover between GDS guidelines and WCAG, as the local UK standard takes inspiration from the global framework and we have experience of ensuring products comply with both.
Financially, we ensure the most cost-efficient approach for our clients. At NEC Digital Studio, we don’t see accessibility as a box-ticking exercise to complete at the end of a project. Where this approach is taken, audits come back with costly recommendations and organisations waste money and time fixing things they could have got right the first time. For us, accessibility is part of project design from the start to save clients future cost implications.
