Starting an Accessibility Program with Shery Byrne Harber and Shilpi Kapoor

Sheri: Yeah, I've done that a couple of times. 

Shilpi: You've done that multiple times as I remember over the years, so we thought we will get people to hear your views and this is going to be a rapid file. I think everybody knows you.
But we will talk about you through this entire session today and just let's have some fun. 

Sheri: That sounds great. 

Shilpi: Fabulous. So my first question to you is what's the first step in launching an accessibility programme, Sheri? 

Sheri: Touches a lot of different parts of an organisation, especially if it's an organisation of any size and you have to remember that people do what they're rewarded to do. That's kind of the bottom line of of human nature. So you have to figure out how to reward people for doing accessibility, whether it's the fact that it's being brought up by an executive sponsor. And so you're making the executive sponsor happy or if it's there's been a demand letter and you're making legal happy or there have been calls to customer support.
You know, figure out a way to reward people who aren't on the accessibility team for contributing to the accessibility effort. 
Shilpi: Well, that is bang on because it leads me into my second question. How do I get leadership buy in for an accessibility programme? 

Sheri: Three different approaches to selling and making air quotes around that word and accessibility programme. I always do them in this order. You know the first thing is it's the right thing to do. If you have a company that's claiming to be inclusive but they're not being accessible, they're not really being inclusive. The second thing is it's going to open doors to more sales, so it makes business sense in that you will be able in the US to sell to the government or the European Accessibility Act is kicking in now in less than a year. So there's going to be restrictions.
On selling things that are inaccessible in Europe and then the third thing is it boils down to it's the law, you know you, you know, dominoes, for example, could have spent $38,000 according to their own litigation paperwork to make their app and website accessible. And they chose not to. And it ended up costing them millions in legal fees and reputation loss and settlement payments and things like that instead. So, it's the right thing to do.
It makes business sense. It's the law. 

Shilpi: And you know, you're literally leading me into my next question. So what's the biggest mistake organisations make when starting an accessibility programme? You just mentioned. 

Sheri   So the biggest mistake Domino's made was not having an accessibility programme. I think the biggest mistake is thinking that the accessibility team is going to do everything and that's not what it's about. You need to start with an accessible design and then you need to go into an accessible implementation and then you need to make sure it's accessible by testing it with native users of assistive technology. Retrofitting existing stuff is hard.
Expensive starting to design something to be accessible from the outset with the accessibility team providing guidance and strategy and training, but not owning the whole quote, unquote accessibility problem is probably the biggest mistake. 

Shilpi: So true, I think I see this on a daily basis with organisations. They believe the accessibility team can be their saviours, which is not always the case. We can't have every skill in the book. 

Sheri: Yeah, I would say a secondary mistake is relying 100% on automated testing. Everybody that wants to automate as much as possible to keep the human costs low. And that's just not feasible at this point. You can get, you know, on a good day 35, maybe 40%. The number's starting to creep up because of AI and machine learning, but it's nowhere near 100%. 

Shilpi: Interesting. So how do you measure the success of an accessibility programme, Sheri? 

Sheri: So this might sound backwards, but I measure success. I get really excited the first time customer support contacts me and says somebody logged a bug because when you aren't accessible at all.
People will go to a competitor and they probably won't call customer support to complain when they call customer support to complain. What they're saying is they got a certain distance into your software ran into a problem. They cared enough to contact the company and they will continue to use your product if you solve the problem so that I think is one measure of success. You know another measure of success is obviously bugs.
You know, if you can, you know, just whittle away, you're going to start with a fairly large number of bugs. And so does, you know, starting to implement consistent procedures and design systems that are accessible to get that number lower and lower.
Regressions is a good way to measure accessibility success. When a development team first starts fixing accessibility bugs, they might not have a lot of experience at it. So 25 to 40% of the bugs that they fix might get kicked back by the QA team or the accessibility team where they're saying no, you didn't fix it completely or no. You introduced this new bug. When you fix this old bug, getting that regression right down to about 10% is the sign of a more mature organisation. 

Shilpi: That is a lot of good advice, I hope people are listening so. 

Sheri: I know you said rapid fire, but I'm not good at short answers. 

Shilpi: Don't worry, I think we love the advice you're giving us, and I think everybody's gonna enjoy it. So we shall make it work. OK, so in Sherry's opinion, which holds more weight having a solid accessibility policy or putting accessibility into everyday practise. 

Sheri: I'm definitely putting accessibility into everyday practise. I mean, there's plenty of companies that have accessibility policies, but the actions don't match the words the you know the policy is the word. Putting it into practise is the action. Action always weighs higher. 

Shilpi: So one piece of advice for anyone hesitant to start an accessibility programme. 

Sheri: Start an accessibility programme. I would do A5 wise analysis on that question. So why is it that you're hesitant to start an accessibility programme? Oh, because your design leader doesn't believe in accessibility. Well, why doesn't your design leader believe in accessibility? Like drill down until you find what the core reason is for that hesitancy and then solve that core reason. 

Shilpi: Very interesting. I've never looked at it like that, but I think you've made that a lot more convincing for me to try that approach in the future. 

Sheri: All of my degrees are about problem solving, so my my legal degree I wanted to solve legal problems. My business degree. I want to solve business problems, so I used that five wise analysis quite frequently and I find it does work. It's fast and it works well. 

Shilpi: Brilliant so. What is?
The most common misconception about starting an accessibility programme that you've heard of. 

Sheri: You know, going back to rephrasing a previous answer, I think the most common misconception is that the accessibility programme, the accessibility team is the be all and end all that they can do everything and they can't. It needs contributions from the entire organisation. It's not enough to get something accessible because you can send it out to a contracting agency. They can make it accessible. But what's going to happen with your next release? So you soon as you change one line of code. If you haven't integrated accessibility into your culture, your product's gonna backslide, so getting the culture to be accessible is critical, and people don't always see that as part of the solution. But it is. It will be much more expensive and much slower if you don't get your culture to integrate accessibility into everything it does. 

Shilpi: So I think this is something we hear from everybody. I have a limited budget. How can I kick start my accessibility effort? 

Sheri: So I actually wrote. A article fairly early on in my blogging career about five years ago called advice for the aspiring accessibility tester slash manager and I broke down the resources into what you had to pay for and what was free and it what you had to pay for. I further broke it down to into is it worth the money or not? So I would take a look at that article there are so.
Many free accessibility testing resources, you know, wave is free. Access is free, teach access is free. The Trusted Tester programme is free. Lack of budget should never be an excuse. You can make some effort with with free resources and then all your investigates time. 

Shilpi: I think we're gonna pull out that blog post and add it to this article when we post it. I think it would be great for everybody to hear.
OK, So what is that one quick win every organisation can have early on in the accessibility journey. 

Sheri: I would say one quick win is to set up an accessibility champions programme. Again, the accessibility team is not the be all and end all. You need people advocating for accessibility when the accessibility team members aren't in the room and the quickest way of doing that is by putting together a champions programme where you provide special training to individuals within various different product teams or maybe within procurement or within HR.
Depending on how far you want it to go and providing you know badging and and you know small rewards going back to my very first answer which is people do what they're rewarded to do make it enticing for people to want to become accessibility champions so they can be your voice in the room. 

Shilpi: And I think my last question is the one that I'm dying to hear you on. So do you believe that accessibility leads to innovation in organisations? 

Sheri: 100% there, there is no doubt in my mind that accessibility leads to innovation, so some of the programmes that I ran at VM Ware were very early adopters of machine learning and generative AI and those were quite innovative for the accessibility space. Also, we know that diversity in general and psychological safety in general lead to innovation and so to build this is kind of a chain reaction.
To build a a good accessibility culture, you want more disabled voices in the room, which means since 70% of voice of disabled people have hidden disabilities, you have to have people who are willing to talk about their hidden disabilities and in order to do that you have to have a psychologically safe organisation. So to build a solid accessibility programme you have to establish the things that are naturally also going to lead to innovation. 

Shilpi: If you don't share the amount of learnt with you in this rapid fire has been just amazing because you've given so much wisdom of your years of learning within this and I think I I hope everybody listens to this again and again because you know, you've talked about rewards, you've talked about buying. You've talked about misconceptions and it's also true and so real. So I just want to thank you for sharing your years of knowledge in such a short time, 15 odd minutes. And I think everybody's got a lot to learn from you. 

Sheri: I don't want to learn I. 

Shilpi: And thank you so much for everything you do in the accessibility world. We really appreciate it. 

Sheri: Well, I appreciate the invite and if people have any questions about any of the answers I've provided or anything about accessibility in general, they can reach out to me on LinkedIn. 

Shilpi: And we will provide your LinkedIn profile link on the on the post also. But thank you once again and this is should be speaking to Sheri and all of us at BarrierBreak really happy that we had you here. Thank you so much.