At Sage, it’s essential to us that we carried out accessibility throughout all groups as a part of our pledge to make all our services accessible by 2025.
The Internet Content material Accessibility Pointers (WCAG) 2.1 present helpful info on what to contemplate when making experiences extra accessible. Nonetheless, as a part of our work to introduce accessibility finest practise to our enterprise, our crew at Sage wished to make the rules simpler to make use of.
This concerned breaking the rules down right into a extra digestible format that our colleagues wouldn’t solely perceive higher, but in addition be capable to implement them straight into their groups and processes.
Learn on to learn how we did this by introducing accessibility finest practices into our Sage methods of working…
Making accessible tips extra accessible
There’s no simple method to put this… the WCAG tips are onerous to grasp.
They’re advanced, lengthy, and written in a manner that, in the event you’re not a topic specialist, you’re going to wrestle to grasp what most of it means. It’s sophisticated.
At Sage, we’re all the time searching for methods to interrupt down limitations, so it was essential for us to discover a method to enable colleagues to successfully perceive and use these day-to-day when growing our services.
Categorising disabilities and growing personas
After trying into numerous approaches of find out how to break down the rules for ease, we determined to group the rules to deal with the disabilities that they help. This gave us round 12 totally different classes that lined many of the WCAG tips.
Discussions with Sage colleagues and our Consumer Researcher for the Design System Workforce led to the suggestion of making some personas alongside this work. This could assist us higher visualise who we try to help utilizing the 12 totally different classes.
We additionally developed five accessibility personas which you can read about on our accessibility hub.
The personas; Mary, Manuel, Anne, Ayesha, and David embrace a mix of disabilities and accessibility challenges. Every persona covers a sure a part of the WCAG tips.
As soon as this was in place, we tackled find out how to implement this into our related groups and merchandise at Sage.
This concerned increasing on every of the personas and displaying which elements of the WCAG tips utilized to every persona. To assist us prioritise, we calculated the estimated variety of customers affected in every class.
Making use of these instruments to create accessibility roadmaps
The beneath picture is an instance of the roadmap we’ve created for the Mary persona. This exhibits how we broke this down into numerous WCAG success standards that was related for this persona.
We then evaluation our services towards this persona to make sure we’re assembly every space of standards. As soon as we’ve tackled the ache factors for every persona, we are able to confidently say that our services can be extra accessible to customers who stay with that incapacity or problem.
Whereas we can’t categorically be certain that each level on this roadmap is related for each one who has Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, or is color blind, we’ve labored to group these in an efficient manner in order that we’re can help as a lot of their accessibility wants as doable.
Adaptability is the important thing to accessibility
There aren’t any ‘one measurement matches all’ options relating to accessibility so finest practise entails being adaptable. This ensures that our crew at Sage can create services which can be accessible to all, regardless of their degree of potential.
It was necessary from the begin to have a transparent path of how we’re going to turn out to be a extra accessible enterprise. Having a transparent method to this relating to designing and growing our services, is essential to our journey.
We nonetheless have loads of work to do round accessibility at Sage however with the fitting folks and dedication, we will obtain our objective.
Discover out extra in regards to the work we’re doing as a enterprise to enhance accessibility for our prospects, colleagues, and companions. Go to our accessibility hub for extra details about the accessibility of our merchandise, colleague coaching, and our design system.