Scaled Accessibility: How Big Dutch Companies Manage Accessibility

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[LARISSA]

Before we head over to our first keynote speaker, I think that you are all aware that the European Accessibility Act will be there in less than 4 weeks, which is maybe quite a challenge for a large organisation.

Our next speaker will tell us a lot about a model that could help you by motivating and working on accessibility for the European Accessibility Act. I really want to introduce Erik Kroes. Please come on stage.

[APPLAUSE]

Good morning, Erik.

[ERIK]

Good morning everybody. Thank you.

[LARISSA]

Erik, you are our consultant specialist in accessibility including the inclusive design and design systems at Inklusivo and you've already worked for quite large organisations like ING, IKEA, VodafoneZiggo. That's quite a lot and very challenging maybe, I guess.

[ERIK]

Yeah, it's fun.

[LARISSA]

Cool.

Tell us all about it, the stage is yours and enjoy.

[ERIK]

Jaap got me up the stage and he came up with this title; Scaled Accessibility: How Big Dutch Companies Manage Accessibility. For me, it's a slightly different story Because it's just the story of what I do and what I've learned in the past years.

A little bit about me. Hi.

I've worked with large companies for about 9 years and these are some of the things I learned. Basically, I'm just going to tell a life story. I'm going to try and keep you awake. It's still the first one, so I hope you're full of coffee and everything. We'll see what happens.

Where did my journey start? I studied industrial design many years ago. I'm not going to mention years because it feels too long already, but at some point I studied industrial design and for medical reasons I had to quit the study very sadly. I liked industrial design, was actually a lot of fun. Afterwards, I started studying photography at an art academy. If you ask me what's Your education, officially I have a bachelor in design, I think.

I thought this would be a good moment for something interactive. I want a big show of hands. Everybody who has a very relevant study and has a bachelor in accessibility or maybe an in-depth study into WCAG, please raise your hand.

[ONLY TWO HANDS RISE IN THE AUDIENCE]

That's how it goes. I like accessibility also because the people that work on accessibility are diverse and working on accessibility is basically a celebration of diversity because you've got so many angles, so many people contributing from their own context. For me that means there's a lot to learn and I like that a lot.

After I studied photography, I was already programming quite a lot and doing stuff with computers that facilitated whatever I want to do with pictures. At some point I thought, "Well, if I do so much with computers, could I pick up a job in ICT maybe?" ICT was hot. They need people and so I did. I applied for a job at ING. They were looking for a front end developer and I joined the accessibility team. I did a lot of things, but I did not feel like a front end developer. At all.

This is basically where the story starts for today. This is what I would like to share with you all. My first step, the foundation at ING, then a bit of culture at IKEA, then at VodafoneZiggo I experienced a lot about scaling, and then bringing it all together, the layer model because I've had my thoughts.

Working this field, you get some experience looking into the… In Dutch, we'd say, look into the kitchen of these organisations, see how things go. I hope to share these things and I hope they benefit you as well and somehow they can be of use.

My starting point was ING. There I was, 2016, front end developer at a bank. I can imagine that this does not feel like the start of a story for accessibility because 2016, that was about the time that all municipalities and governmental organisations got into accessibility, and they got their whole laws and regulations. I was not an accessibility person within a government organisation, I was a front end developer at a bank. How did that work?

ING had this accessibility team and I did do some front end developer stuff. Like I know how to code. That does happen. I did so much things more than that. Like I had conversations with all kinds of people when it came to designers, or developers, or content writers, managers. Everybody had their questions about accessibility and what it was and I had the luxury that we had this team of specialists.

I was able to have some good interesting conversation, learn a lot about the other people as well. Besides that, we did pretty much anything to put accessibility on the map. You design posters and you put them up in the coffee corner and hope that people see them and do something with it. Basically, anything that's necessary, training, documentation… I did everything.

I did notice this pattern that when I talked to developers, they often said yeah what we do is great. We make the best stuff, but these components that we use, that's the issue. It's not us no, no. It's the components.

That was not the most satisfying message for me. What I did is I joined the design system team. I said, "Well, if the components are the issue, then let's work on the components." I really like design systems and I had a great time there.

Eventually, I became responsible as product owner for the design system team even and I still have a sweet spot for them. If you can solve something in one spot, that's an issue in many places, go for it.

What did I learn? First of all, the term practitioners, I don't know a good Dutch word for it still, but I picked this up in Britain where I worked for a company and they said the practitioners, is basically everybody who's actually building something. That's the designers, the content writers, the developers. Those are practitioners and I really like it because I think in the end, those are the people who make the difference because they have to put in the work.

What I learned at ING is that you need at least two things for these people. They need to have the proper resources and they need the skills. I'll go into this a bit more in the parallel session as well, so I won't go too deep right now, but when I think of skills, I think of stuff like training.

You come into a company, you say, "What's your experience with accessibility?" They're like, "Well maybe I did something a few years back with colour contrast maybe or I did something for a government once, but it wasn't really on the map yet."

A lot of people need skills that they don't have yet. Some people do have the skills, which is a luxury. Part of the thing that you have to do as an organisation is make sure that all the practitioners have the skills. You can tell them to do something, but if they're not able to do it, well, that's quite troublesome.

Coupled with that are the resources. An example is if you have a design system and it's hanging together from tape and threads, and I don't know what, and it's almost falling apart, maybe those are not the resources to build something great. You want a proper design system that is accessible in the base, and then when the person applies it, they can build something that's actually accessible. That's nice.

You need proper resources and that also means tooling. Documentation is valuable for both resources and skills. There are all these things that I noticed especially at ING. You need these in your process. I thought practitioners, they need resources and skills.

Then, when I learned a lot at ING, I thought, "Well what else is there?" Then I joined another company and I learned something about culture. I want to say it's not that IKEA… This is about IKEA, so it doesn't mean that ING has no culture. That's not the story I want to tell today, but I noticed the value of culture. Specifically at IKEA, I noticed their mission.

It was 2022. They said for the many people. That's some Swedish translation. I don't know… My Swedish is not good enough to know where it comes from. Basically, this is how it translates. They want to make stuff that works for everybody. I thought, "Yeah, you don't even have to change something about that to put accessibility in there." That's great.

What I noticed at IKEA was that, this really was a living mindset. Everybody was very open to the message of accessibility. I can show you this even. The practitioners again, you see the big block at the bottom I hope with practitioners and below it there's a block called support with community and culture. I thought there was this very much a living community and that supported the practitioners. When you do accessibility you feel like, "I'm not the only one. We're all doing this here. It's the way we do things."

Then above is a block for management and basically what management needs to do for petitions, it's really simple. Just give them a mandate and make sure that the requirements and the goals that they include accessibility. If you have a definition of done, make sure there's something in there about accessibility. Hey, what we deliver, it should be accessible. That's what we're expected to do. Then the management might be inspired by a mission or a vision from the company on a broader scale and then that might be influenced by other extrinsic motivations like we want more market share or we just want to make more money or those things.

In the end, I really don't care what motivates people to do something. I just want those practitioners to build something that's accessible. That's the end result. It's a bit sad when companies stop at compliance and don't go any further or even stop before compliance, which is technically also something that happens. But in the end, I just want accessible results. This is what I really noticed at IKEA is having a culture of accessibility where everybody says, "Hey, we're doing this thing and we're doing it together?" Really useful.

Then my next lesson was in scaling. But the year before, I started working with VodafoneZiggo. I wrote down the word assessment because it's rather interesting. I think the next slide might tell you a little.

When we look at the European Accessibility Act, there's this whole list of products and services that should comply. There's 13 of them. VodafoneZiggo has at least six of those. There are 5 regulatory bodies in the Netherlands. VodafoneZiggo runs into at least 4 of those. They have 6 or 7 separate brands depending on how you count them. Then what I wasn't even able to count is the number of journeys, processes, and touchpoints. Where sometimes you have these organisations that say, "Do we really need to comply? I don't think this really applies to us. Let's just keep doing what we're doing." It's not an option.

At VodafoneZiggo, you have so much and there's so much to… There are so many branches that have to comply and there are so many processes and there are so many ways that people get in touch with you and have these touchpoints and these journeys. It was so very broad and that is what makes it interesting as well because it was not just make the website accessible and be done with it. There was much more to it.

This was the image that I had from working there and I will try to explain. The thing is I've had this… I'm telling this story about years of experience, but putting these into slides and some images that people actually understand, that's quite challenging.

What I noticed when I started there is that we had all these separate teams, more than the 6 that I pictured here, of course. My role, as part of the Accessibility Foundation, I was there. My role was to support all these teams and be like a catalyst to reach this target. What that target is, that's dependent on your organisation. It could be compliance, it could be more. That was basically the goal to bridge this gap, and say, "Hey, we're going to help you right now to get compliant, but also to get all these teams up to speed to do it themselves."

That was quite a challenge because as I said, it's not just the website. Just some things that I hope your cogwheel start turning when you think about this already, but there's not 1 website because you have ziggo.nl and you have vodafone.nl. Because they're like 2 different products and services. But then they both also have a closed environment. You can log in, and then you can do all stuff, which is basically a whole another website, so that makes 4. Then you have hollandsnieuwe, which is another phone brand or telephone brand, I don't know how you call it. That's 5 and they also have this login environment, so that makes 6. Then all of them have apps as well.

We're lucky that Vodafone and Ziggo have one combined app, so that lessen the work a little bit. That's all the digital stuff. Then you've got the touchpoints with customers because customers can call you, but just being able to call you is not enough, so they can also e-mail. They also have a chat on the website. Then you have the whole customer service who needs to know like, "Hey, we're doing accessibility." Maybe we get people with disabilities on the line and we should know how to act and deal with that. Not just be perplexed and say, "Hey what's this? I cannot have a conversation like I'm used to. I actually have to be empathetic and think about what I'm saying."

Those people need the skills and the tools as well. They also need to be able to handle these things. It goes even further because when you're not able to install something yourself and the customer service cannot help you out, then you get somebody that comes to your door and says, "Hey, we're going to help you out." There's a physical support part as well. They've got stores as well and the stores are somehow connected to all these processes as well.

Then there's a business side, and you have hardware as well, and there's software on the hardware, and it works together with other devices. This is just a part of it. That's why I said in the previous slide, can I go back? That's why I said assessment because just getting a map of everything that you need to do, that's a pretty big map, and that's already a challenge in itself.

I started working with this and I thought, the layer model. This still needs a catchy acronym because I think layer model's not really like… I can come up with something better, but this is what we have to deal with for now. If you do have good ideas, reach out to me later and maybe we can pick something up, but this is it for now.

What I did together ith some other people, specifically Eva Westerhoff who isn't here right now, but Diede Gulpers who is in this room, and you might shake his hand later today. We all have a lot of experience with large organisations while having disabilities ourselves. We thought, "Hey, can we apply our experience both the professional experience and the lived experience, and support these large organisations?"

Like I said EAA, there's quite a lot happening right now, so maybe people could benefit from that. We just launched something called agency model that we would like to help large organisations, not because we're going to do everything ourselves, but because we also know a lot of people that we think, "Hey, but this is the party that you need and you need these people."

Maybe just doing an audit and having some report after a few months is not the way to get your organisation inclusive. We need a bit more strategy than that. I combined the ideas that I had at ING and the idea that I had at IKEA. I think practitioners anywhere in an organisation, they need the proper resources, the proper skills, and they need support from community and culture, and the mandate, and requirement, and goals from the management.

This is what motivates people, but this is also what people need to get moving. My experience is mostly with people like designers and developers, whole digital part. When you think about support on the phone, these people need the same things.

Why I have the literal examples of what does a developer need, I think this applies to everybody. While thinking about this more, writing about this more, I also discovered there's a book which pretty much copies this model. That made me feel like, "Hey, maybe it actually makes sense." There's a book by Daniel H. Pink… I think is his name, and it's called Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

They basically mention the same three things, of course with different wording because it's not a book about accessibility, it's about motivation. It maps, and it feels like he's writing about the same thing. That makes me really feel like it's very useful in a lot of fields. I think this is what we need.

Everybody needs resources, and skills, and then the support, and the mandate or the requirements. They need this to get working. You can be… I thought last night. I did some thinking tonight about this presentation before I gave it. It happens.

What happens if you don't have one of them? See, I can imagine if you don't have the skills, but you do have the resources and the support and you're really motivated, you're like, "I'm going to build something beautiful." But you have no idea what you're doing. With all the good intentions, you might build something that feels really good, but doesn't quite reach to a goal.

The same thing is if you have the skills, and the support, and the whole community, and culture, but you don't have the resources, it's really hard to build something accessible when you don't have the resources. It feels like fighting an uphill battle and all the stories about, "Building something accessible is extra work." Probably when you don't have the resources. That's very true.

Make sure the resources are there. When you do have the resources and the skills, but there's like no mission or vision, I think this happens in companies like when you have a role at one company and you're like, "We're going to do everything accessible and you get the best education, and then you're somewhere else, and they don't even care."

I don't think you're going to do it. Maybe you sneak it in every here and there, you say like, "Hey, I added an alt text, and you didn't see it." You're not really motivated to work on this. I think if one of the three misses, then you're going to have issues. I also had this idea still, there's a VodafoneZiggo thing with scaling and the safety net. I thought how can we then find something for this?

I think this is the end state where you want to go to. You want every team to grow. You want them to have the resources. You want them to have the skills. Then I know in large organisations some people go further than others. You'll often have a team of specialists and they're not really a team. It's more like in every team you have people that are more interested than others.

Those are your champions, your ambassadors. When you look online, you see the term champions a lot. In other lines of work, they call them ambassadors. The idea is a bit the same. You have some specialists and if you're in a team and maybe as a team you can do 80% if you want to do for accessibility. Then for the next 10% you say, "Hey, maybe we should ask one of those champions." When the champion doesn't have the answer, they can discuss it with other champions and you have this whole community.

I think that's the situation that you want in an organisation. Then ideally, if the champions don't know it because well, maybe they reach 90% or 95%… I don't have exact numbers. This is a theory, so I don't need numbers.

Then above those champions, I think you should have some central point for accessibility. I said here accessibility centre because it differs between organisations how large you want to have this. It could be a whole team because there's a lot to say about accessibility. Like with the example of VodafoneZiggo, there's so many disciplines. It could also be one person.

I think there should always be one person at least pushing the agenda and keeping it all on track and saying, "Hey, we need this managed situation where we can keep track of things and make sure that all the teams do get the training and that accessibility is part of the onboarding." That's why I think you need a centre.

Even the centre doesn't need to make it fully accessible or reach whatever goal they want, I think there should be some support behind it. Whether that's an external company, or international support from a community, I don't really mind, but some net to catch you, some safety net when you know you have this question, nobody knows the answer that you know, but we have this person that we can ask or this team.

I think this is like an ideal model. Let's say 80% is done by your team, then with the champions you do 90%, then with the accessibility centre maybe you reach a 98% and then you have this fallback. It's also nice for checking every now and then, getting an outside opinion. That's where the audits do come in again because you want to keep things in check and say, "Hey, are we still on the right way?"

I think ideally this is the situation you want to end up within an organisation. This is what I'm really looking forward to say like, "Hey, I want to work with organisations to build this because I think this is the way not just to build something that is compliant, but to stay compliant." It's a scalable model. My experience is that it works.

That's basically what I wanted to share with you. My experience in the past few years and how I think this applies to any organisation and how large or small you want to make it.

I said please connect. I have a website, and a LinkedIn, and a Discord, and a Messenger. Any platform I'm there.

You might notice from the tempo that I'm speaking at, I'm very passionate about accessibility. Probably if you ask me a question, I will answer no matter what. I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing, but that's the way it goes.

Please connect and reach out and if there's anything, let me know. Also for now, if there's any questions, I would love to answer them. A little bit goes into the parallel session this afternoon, but that's mostly about the first part and not as much about the scaling part, probably.

Again, ask me questions and I'll answer.

[LARISSA]

First of all, thanks a lot because it was very interesting.

[APPLAUSE]