Disability smart webinar: Technology

good afternoon everybody and welcome to our disability smart uh webinar uh with a focus on technology part of our series we've been running on our disability smart framework which is generously supported by our friends at unilever let me introduce myself everyone welcome i am lucy ruck i'm the task force manager at business disability forum i always end up putting this slide in otherwise i just rattle on and forget to introduce myself so uh that's me but you don't just have to listen to me today i'm delighted to be joined by my co-hosts i've got kathy steed from unilever darren rowan from eli lilly denise wood from pwc and sarah john from natwest and you're getting from them a little later on so let me tell you a little bit about the technology task force so the technology task force is about organizations working together to make technology accessible for everyone that kind of sums it up but i'm just going to explain a little bit more detail about sort of how we came about what we do so we launched back in 2008 so we've been around for a little while now and the reason we came together as a group is there is a kind of feeling that technology should be the answer to all the issues and problems that we face and what we actually found was technology was often becoming the barrier to organizations so we pulled together a group of our partner organizations at bdf and uh created the technology task force and being a kind of action orientated group that they are they decided they wanted to create some tools and resources so we created the accessible technology charter and the accessibility maturity model i'm going to talk you through that um in a little while so that's that's who we are a little bit in what we do so what i'm going to do now i'm going to hand over to darren from eli lilly who's rather than me telling you why accessibility matters to business we're going to go to a business and they're going to tell us why it's important to them so over to you darren thanks lucy hi everyone um as i said i'm darren rowan i work for eli lillian company as a program manager um what i really want to talk about then is why accessibility matters and and why it matters to all of us as businesses not just the eli lillian company there are multiple reasons why accessibility matters first of all from an inclusion perspective if we look at the world's population we know that at least 15 of that population has a disability and in fact that's regarded as being quite a conservative number these days we quite often hear as we talk in many countries and the developed countries especially that it's more like one in five and maybe more that have a disability and then when we look at that um as it impacts the family and friends um you know we then start to think about this it could be over sort of 50 of the population i think the valuable 500 put it at something like 54 of the population being impacted it's a huge amount of people and actually there's a lot of money that goes with that so from a business perspective you wouldn't want to miss out on that type of demographic and the amount of money that we're talking here is said to be up to 13 trillion dollars which is a huge amount so quite often we say that disabilities are the largest minority group in the world that anybody can join at any time so it's it's a it's a a huge market to consider and also from the inclusion perspective first and foremost it's really important to bear that in mind um but we also know that having diverse workforces makes you more profitable as a business and more innovative as a business and we'll talk more about that in a moment but a recent report from accenture said actually diverse companies are up to four times more profitable as a business historically there have been many inventions then that have been uh first of all designed and created specifically for people with disabilities um i guess some of the obvious ones could be around closed captions obviously many of us use today um on the tv and many of the calls like the one that we're on today um but also things like the typewriter that later became the keyboard was invented for a blind person um text messaging was also invented for deaf and who hasn't used a text message in the last couple of decades um but then when we think about physical innovations the obvious ones are those designed for wheelchairs initially like ramps and curb cuts etc um that become you know beneficial to so many people in making mobility easier uh regardless of whether you have a disability or not and one of the other ones is the bendy straw that we like to um point out was created by a father for his disabled daughter um whilst in in hospital to help with drinking and actually it's still very much in use today in in hospitals so when we think of those things that were designed specifically for um disabled people and then they became mainstream use and opportunities as well also your workforce workforce needs to reflect the market that you serve and clearly as we stated already that we know that we're all different and uh disability is one of those dimensions of difference that we need to be considering and so we need to make sure that we're accessible in our company and we need to make sure that we're thinking about workplace adjustments where we haven't already managed to design for all those features that most people be able to take advantage of so you need to be proactive around how you are making accessibility as part of what you do but also you need to be mindful of those workplace adjustments um in the us the job accommodation network they found that 72 percent of workplace adjustments uh or 72 percent of people who'd have workplace adjustments were said to be more productive than ever before and also there's always this myth around workplace adjustments and aren't they too expensive um microlink have done some research around this as well and the average cost in the uk was said to be around 650 pounds so really not that expensive or when you think and many of those can be even less than that or even free if they come down to more workplace arrangements um and then finally i suppose from research done from the bdf themselves on their great big workplace adjustments survey and in the last couple of years um 42 of respondents um i found that they'd acquired their or had an adjustment because they'd acquired their disability during their work in life and i think what this really hammers home and back to my comment earlier about you know you can unfortunately join this community at any time you know due to circumstances and therefore you need to often consider that you know whilst people are working for you today and and um that can change in their circumstances and as we get older then that becomes more likely so you need to kind of remember it's not a case of us and then but you know really thinking of us as one large community here um i think that the the final piece to mention um and we don't tend to talk as much about this in the task force because it's all about what can we do to be innovative and inclusive but of course compliance is is really important to remember as well um the laws for uh disability inclusion and accessibility are quite rightly tightening around the world and there are various standards that you need to adhere to if you're going to be serious about this but i think most importantly to build this into what you do earlier will means that it means that it saves you money and a lot more issues and potential uh litigation in the wrong one and it's even estimated by uh dq who did some research that it could cost you up to 100 times more expensive if you don't build this in so if what i told you before with the carrots for accessibility i guess this last one is really the stick so yeah there's some of the things to think about when considering why does accessibility matter lucy making accessibility your business have you ever felt that you need to adapt to the environment because the environment is not adapted for you have you ever felt like you don't quite fit in have you ever felt that you're not understood this is how it feels for the many millions of people living with disabilities every day and the same is true in the digital world did you know that over 15 of the world's population have a disability and that the total spending power of the disability community is estimated at 13 trillion dollars every year the good news is prioritizing accessibility and disability inclusion will not only win and keep your customers [Music] it will help your business rise above the competition we have broken down the benefits into five key areas innovation a diverse workforce boasts a wider array of skills strengths and ideas with diverse ideas come new opportunities for your business to succeed inclusion inclusive design leaves no one behind diverse workforces reflect the needs of diverse customer bases inclusive design ensures that places experiences and products are open to all regardless of age disability and background brand an inclusive brand outperforms its competition brand accessibility ensures your brand is responsive and relevant to all customers today want to do business with compassionate organizations that put their customers needs before profits productivity accessible solutions boosts productivity for everyone they're easier to navigate intuitive simpler organizations that are focused on accessibility are four times more likely to see returns that outperform the competition compliance by raising the bar on compliance you're reducing the risk to your organization the law is strengthening for people with disabilities around the world being classed as inaccessible will cost you time and money in dealing with the complaints and negatively impact your brand disability is the only minority group that anyone can join at any time it knows no barriers to find out more about the free resources available around accessibility visit businessdisabilityforum.org.uk brought to you by microlink in partnership with business disability forums technology task force apologies i was slightly out of sync there um so that video is a nice summary of what's something that we put together called the accessibility business case which effectively is a landing page uh on the bdf website that uh the the link's already been shared in the chat um what you saw earlier with some of the slides i was sharing that is also part of the content so what we've done is we've we've provided a set of slides we've provided a full document and done a fair amount of research into terms of sources that were already out there and included those as links as part of the overall business case uh website and um and document itself and then this was the final piece that you just saw the video which i think is a a nice way of summarizing it all up and hopefully pointing you to those resources again um the piece that i really like about it is that you know there's accessible imagery in here as well as um it's obviously got captions built in and as um was said on the chat as well there's also an audio described version of this so yeah we're really proud of what we've uh delivered and we just love to hear from others and and see hopefully you can use it i was worried he wouldn't play at all and i could have played it three times now thank you for that darren um really useful and again i think we've got signposts in the chat to where to find and access that information apologies i think i've got slightly out of sync because you were presenting there as well so but you know it just proves it's live doesn't it yep um i'm going to move on now to talk to you a little bit about the accessibility maturity model so darren touched very much on the why we need to do this the business case the why it's important i'm going to do a little bit more about the the drilling down and how you figure out what you need to focus on so i touched on earlier on that the tech task was created the accessibility maturity model um but i'm going to tell you a little bit about what it is and what does it aim to do because i think that's really important there's something incredibly important about knowing what does good look like what things do i need to be thinking about when thinking about digital accessibility and that's what this does it's a self-assessment tool it's a framework for you to use and to make sure that you're thinking about all aspects around digital accessibility it was also developed by a range of organizations to work for everyone so you'll be pleased to know i didn't sit in a room by myself and design and develop this was this is developed by organizations from government agencies from banks to supermarkets to energy companies to software companies who've been in help helped to design this in the first place and i think we've um gone through about four iterations of it so we've revised it and continue to revise it to make sure it still works for a wide group of people and that it's clear and easy to use it is also free which is always nice we like a freebie so it's a free resource um developed by world leaders in accessibility so i'm now going to show you what it looks like do not worry you do not have to read what is on screen what i'm going to do is i just it's useful for you to have a visual picture if that helps you and i will describe what this looks like so we call it the amm because the accessibility maturity model is a little bit of a mouthful these are the first five points there's another five points on the next slide which i will come to in a moment what you have is you have five levels of maturity which is why it's called a maturity model so level one is quite informal so you might have no documentation or processes in place level two is then defined it's documented but not actioned or only completed once level three is repeatable so process is established and actioned consistently level four is managed so process is monitored and improved and it becomes part of your business as usual and level five uh best practice um you innovate and improve and you share um what we've then got is if you think of it as a grid you've got a lot of bullet points in there and they're your prompt so if you're hitting these bullet points then you're doing something around that what i also think of it as a little bit is a bit of a cheat sheet so if you're already at level two and you want to know what do i need to do to get to level three or four it's giving you the guidance on the things you need to be thinking about to be able to move up to that next level and this covers a number of areas uh within uh the technology space so things like having commitment having a senior champion in place we all know we say this across the board at bdf you've got someone senior saying that this is important to you and your organization it's going to be a lot easier you to get stuff done things around disability awareness consultation with staff and colleagues to make sure they're involved in the processes making sure you're able to access the built-in accessibility that comes with so many pieces of software and apps these days things like workplace adjustments obviously that has a tech element quite often i'm just going to move on to the next slide as well so again you've got the same levels of maturity but we're looking at things like accessibility know how how do you know your colleagues within tech have got the right knowledge and skills to support people benchmarking so how do you know how you're doing development life cycle procurement and supply partners and then that continuous improvement piece so some of these will be very familiar to you in the tech space but this is like i'm not going for every bullet point that would take the whole 45 minutes but you can see how it's almost telling you where you would fit depending on how you do now you can give yourself half scores in this so you don't have to fit entirely neatly in a box um because if you're doing some in level three and some in level four you might go level three and a half so you decide where you fit what i also wanted to share was that the tactile sports have been um doing these scores now beginning of the calendar year we sit them down and we ask them to give us their scores now of course they're confidential so we don't share individual organizations scores but it's incredibly useful for us to look for patterns what i think is quite interesting is not always do scores go up scores can go down year on year depending on different things and it's incredibly complex to understand and to pick this out but as an average across the board people are scoring somewhere around two and a half and this is useful because if you just do this for the first time and you're scoring ones and twos don't beat yourself up about it everyone else has been there um so i just always think that's quite reassuring for people and focusing on this year's scores it's always useful to see where the patterns are and this helps us to think what we want to focus on as a group within the technology task force so you can see within this one something like workplace adjustments is consistently scoring higher and has done so for many years basically i think organizations focus on this and it's obviously a really good place to start with to make sure you're focusing on that but areas like accessibility know-how so giving your staff the right training things like life cycle procurement has been a long-standing issue we've now set up a procurement network separately outside of technology um so these are areas we know organizations are generally finding a little bit more of a challenge so um this was a quote i got after doing the amm this year so it was so helpful to revisit it we scheduled to do it again in six months time to help us keep on track and revisiting it and i'm gonna bring sarah in from that west here so rather than me telling you why this is important sarah's gonna ask you to share why you find it useful and why it's important to nat west thank you very much lucy and hello everyone so um really useful for nat west um year upon year we do this and to try that and what it does for us is it it gives us some tangible actions that we can take and to improve our position so what we tend to do is go through that those bullet points under each thing and we highlight in green the ones we're doing and we highlight in red the ones that we're not and but what it gives us is then well what do we need to do to turn that red into a green so those tangible actions start to come out with a bit of a plan of then how we move up from one level to another also really great from a communication tool because it gives you that sort of common language that everyone can talk so we get together with the key stakeholders across the business that have a stake in this i suppose and can drive forward those actions and then we do it together and therefore you've got that common language that you can talk to one another about you agree where you're at and then you agree what you need to do to move forward and then it gives you a a little road map and a plan and also then we prioritize it as well so sometimes it may not be um the right thing for the business the right appetite to do everything and and go up a significant amount of levels in one big bang it might be that we prioritize some things over another for that for that customer impact or that employee impact and so that's how we we tend to use it um and also as um lucy says with those average scores it gives us an opportunity to benchmark we're always asked that question so how do we compare with others how are we doing with others against this and then what we can do is say well we can't tell you how we're comparing against x company but what we can do is as an average of these companies this is where we compare to them uh so most people are here and we would like to be here and how do we get there from one bit to another and hopefully that sort of explains how we use it on a practical level and i i would advocate it's a really useful practical tool and enables great communication and that collaboration to improve and mature that's great thanks ever so much for sharing that sarah um so how does it help uh to make this work your organization needs to commit from the top down and across as i say it doesn't just sit within the tech department tech doesn't fit in a neat little box i don't think anymore uh the 1980s are gone apparently um until you assess where you are how do you know where you need to improve quite often people will do this and it's maybe not the areas they thought that they were finding a challenge it might be something else it's nice and quantifiable accessibility doesn't tend to happen by mistake so unless you're actively looking at this you're probably not doing the right thing so it gives you a really good framework the tools are there you just need to use them um things like the maturity model there's a lot of free stuff around accessibility it's a very supportive community so you know go and have a look and see if you can find it or reach out to us and we can help you sign post you we've got a lot of free resources um within the knowledge hub and do it one step at a time which i think is really important if you try and tackle it all it's going to be a real challenge so focus on what you want to do again sarah touched on this as well and then keep doing it it's not a one-time and done it's a building it into your business as usual so i'm gonna hand over to uh kathy indonesia and uh sarah as well so one of the areas we talked about where we found we were struggling a little more was around accessibility training and so we decided to create a resource for that so i'll hand over to you now thanks lucy so um accessibility training a guide to available resources so accessibility is about making information products and systems available for everybody and whether that's writing our emails managing products designing managing projects designing products and procuring tech so we all need to think about accessibility and there's plenty of training available but knowing what is right for you and your colleagues can be difficult to navigate and find so the work streams aim was to look at what training is available um and how can we put that together as a one-stop shop commun a one-stop shop guidelines document for people to come and consume from the bdf's website so how did we do this so we focused on the how and not the why and we went through um a number of steps and criteria to uh to achieve this so this if you can move to the next slide thank you so there's lots of training available but what is best the group was not about rewriting new content but leveraging and con collating existing content and then we found what we found useful as subject matter experts from the work stream group whilst upskilling ourselves and our colleagues so those three elements together is that members of the work stream have upskilled themselves to become smes in their digital accessibility areas so we utilized our collective experience to compile a list of training that we had all found useful and had recommended internally to our colleagues at work and had kept going back to and to reuse and we agreed on what constituted good quality and informative training so there was a lot of resources available so essentially we wanted that one-stop shop for everybody just to come to to help people get started and keep coming back to consume we then looked at um how to identify our audience uh creating high-level role descriptions based upon relevant skill sets and we matched these levels of competencies against the accessibility proficiency that those roles would need and this was based upon the industry standard roles but with no rigid guard rails so the group decided that you know individuals can consume as much or as little of this training as they wish but it's available to all to consume essential what the essential part of the end of putting the toolkit together in that website feel that kathy will go through in a moment was that the um tool itself went through accessibility and usability testing so as a work stream we we tested that ourselves using testing tools and manual accessibility testing and we also then took the um the guide to our technology task force members for them to review and test it prior to go live and kathy is going to run you through what the toolkit looks like cathy you're on mute i'm afraid you've done it just wanted to make sure everybody was still listening and paying attention yeah exactly thanks kathy yeah so it is a um a website toolkit on the bdf site and which is available to everybody and it's freely available resource as lucy said earlier and do you want to just bring up the next screen lucy because this gives a view of what the toolkit looks like so nice and easy to find and as denise says we've done some testing to make sure that it is accessible so um come on to the next slide please loosely and as we say we've structured it based on four skill levels so there was a basic level which was getting started the learning more the advanced and specialist now the idea was not that you started from getting started and moved through the criterias but you go through the levels depending on what it is you need and most people will start from getting started learning more but then advance the specialist will be more around the kind of roles that you are maybe doing next slide please lucy so here we go as you can see sit up in this way the introduction basis around it then the getting started the learning more the advanced and the specialist so this is where you can really delve deep into the the training material that's been curated all of this material is split depending on whether it's paid or free and the different learning styles so you'll be able to go in there and be able to see things such as webinars or more formal training certificates here we go so you can see and as we split it out you can see whether it's a a free or a paid for course and whether it's a video whether it's a website and some blogs there as well so hopefully to cover all different learning styles and as i said before getting started is applicable to everybody in your organization it's kind of like the that the fundamentals the real basic um information that we believe everybody in the organization should have um in their getting their accessibility journey so yeah so that was a quick quick as whistle stop tour of the the site and i suppose my question for sarah would be um how were you planning on using this within that with sarah thank you kathy so um i think a key thing for the organization the size of that west and is the different levels of understanding on this subject so from the novice what are you talking about what is digital accessibility to the tester who has a huge amount of knowledge or maybe someone who's developing the mobile app which is growing in their knowledge as well and so what i love about this resource and i wanted to say was was that ease of actually being able to dip into it whoever you are with all that different level of experience and understanding and it's got something for everybody and so far i have um linked to the resource on our internal intranet sites and that itself that internal internet site is going to get some publication and some communication so great to be able to signpost um such an amazing resource um and also we're incredibly lucky because one of our key keys uh like focus areas as a bank is learning and so this nicely ties into as we're becoming more mature in our digital accessibility journey how how do we help our colleagues help themselves and it's like well actually it's to do with capability and let's lean into this learning so from from this to our perspective it's brilliant timing and i'm great to be able to advertise such a brilliant resource that's been pulled together from a variety of different expertise across different um industries really so um and it goes all the way from them signposting the apprentice scheme as well so it's not just webinars and um and training it's also got the um so i'm posting apprentice scheme as well where you can get some actual skills and qualifications for this which is great so yeah i love it so really good lovely thank you for that um i was going to say if anyone who's tuned into this webinar's got any questions they'd like us to to answer please do put those in the q a um and we'll try and get back to those those next which would be fantastic should have said that at the beginning but forgot um we do have a question in here as well um i just need to put my reading glasses on yet i'm at that age so um uh is there a list of assistive technologies that are supportive to gdpr ce iso 27001 environments so the majority we've seen so far are sas so s double a s based which are hosted in the us we've compiled a list of our own however if you can advise of any you know that would be great so i think sometimes this is around the security issues um with storing data i'm thinking um and i know that sometimes that can be it's things are stored outside of the is am i getting the wrong end of the stick there's anyone got anyone think they want to do we've got a bit techie now haven't we um yeah that's correct um i know that quite often for captioning um people need stuff on servers in the uk especially with ai stuff and i know that we use a number of different companies who can do that but quite often um organizations who design and develop that assistive technology will have the answers for you so it'd be quite specific to each one so i know we've had queries around the use of text help and they publish information around that darren you've unmuted yourself so i see that as a sign did you want to come in on this one um it's quite uh technical and um in terms of i i certainly don't the whole list of them i think it's a good question i know maybe it's a good one you know for the tech task force to um combine minds around uh what we know already i suppose in in my company we do have to go through a third party risk management with any kind of software right so as you said we'd have to contact them and perhaps even even if it did state some things on their own websites you'd have to run through a level of due diligence to make sure that you were happy with it as a company anyway yeah and again um martin thank you for putting in the chat about grammarly is a good example where they hold the data in the us um i know for many of our organizations if they're financial services or banks they have their limitations of how they can deal with that stuff so i know it is yes by all means ask them but you need to do is as darren said your own due diligence in terms of um what you need and what you require yeah i was going to add some flavors around what dara said as well and if you go back to that particular supplier they will be able to tell you where their data is held and some do do that combination of um european data center sites for the sas solution versus for the us in order to get in order to support companies meet their security data needs so the best conversation as darren said would be having that with the suppliers that you're looking at yeah so we do have a list of assistive technology we've got an assistive technology catalog that you can download up we'll find that and we'll pop that in the chat or we can send that out later after the webinar but we don't cover anything around security and i think that's probably up to organizations but and every organization is slightly different you know some can be quite flexible in terms of what they're able to have where the others can have more restrictions around them so but yeah good question an interesting one and we often still get that conversation does does security trump accessibility is it more important is it stopping people from accessing stuff and i think it very much depends on is the security actually really an issue or is it just an easy excuse not to provide something but maybe that's i'm a little bit cynical about that i've been doing this job too long maybe but uh um if you've got any other questions do ask us i think one of the other things i was going to ask is around the maturity model and again we've got links to all of that information within the chat so please do all the stuff we're talking about today is free so it's really nice to be able to talk about free stuff you can use an access um the maturity model also i think there's something around it being developed not by your own organization or by a competitor that gives it its uh what's the word i'm looking for it's oh it's edge and it's um i know i can't think of it but it but but it makes you have more faith in it because that's it maybe because it's yeah yeah um so i think that can be really helpful to organizations i know organizations who've used it and they've gone oh we've scored really badly on this one um is that a bad thing and they've gone no i'm actually quite pleased because i knew it was rubbish so i've been able to take that to my senior stakeholders and prove to them through a kind of separate tool and say look this is how we're scoring against something so it can be incredibly helpful for organizations to use it as the the stick to to raise issues um with sort of senior stakeholders on the on this topic so uh and i'm gonna pick on kathy a little bit here as well now you're a little newer to using the maturity model um and so you've got that recollection of when you first opened it and it because it does look daunting it i think in a way it's quite inaccessible in terms of how it looks and feels but can you talk me through how you found it um using the model so yeah no i mean i thought it was a fabulous resource right because um we just didn't have a benchmark we just did not know where we were and actually it's so and so detailed and but so clear so you start off and you go through each one one by one and you start sort of like and you'd look at the criteria and each one there's like a statement so you'd read that statement and you go are we doing that yes yes we are no we're not and and then you move on to the next one are we doing that yes we are no we're not and it very quickly um pulled out a really great picture of where our hot spots were and our cool spots were and what are the things that we needed to do to move up so i loved it because um when i came into this i was you know really green and i knew nothing but what this did was this really gave some um tangible actionable items that we could do to say yes if we want to do better at this these are the things that we need to be doing and and that's what i loved i thought it was such a great resource fantastic i knew i invited you on this webinar for a good reason kathy i'm i was just going to touch a little bit on our other resources we talked about so we talked about the business case that darren presented on at the beginning and and just to reiterate you know that we've created a number of tools around that because sometimes we're still having the conversation about why do we need to do this why is it important which is why we created that that resource so again all that information is free and we've tried to balance out what we felt with the five areas that were really important sorry i flicked through the slides and slightly at the wrong tempo i think daryl and i obviously didn't coordinate that quite well enough but um all of that stuff is available and what was really nice is when we were pulling together this presentation we've got a slide deck on there that you could use to present why this is important we lifted some of those slides from that slide deck with the text that sits within the notes and put it into this presentation so darren kind of had the easy job not like undermining darren's input to the day because he'd already done the hard work in being part of the work stream that pulled together that information in the first place so people can lift that use it within your organization and if one of those areas doesn't land with your organization i mean compliance can be a tricky one i think sometimes it is the stick isn't it and people don't always like it and it doesn't it's been a compliance issue for many years you can literally just delete bits from it and use it how you see fit darren did you want to come in on that yeah i was just going to say because we built in sort of facilitation notes into the slides as well then you know we've used it i've confined it over to our accessibility champions community right and again even in the company a global organization you could have some functions that are more interested in some of those themes and others like you said compliance versus innovation right and so if they really want to try and get on board some stakeholders they might tend to focus more on that area so they've got some slides to get started and then they might want to build something of their own on top of that so it's kind of free for people to take that say i want to deliver something or i want to deliver something in 5 or 10 minutes i think that's why we thought the video was quite nice to do a three-minute thing and then if you want to go and learn more go here so we wanted to have it for a variety of stakeholders in a variety of situations and for different types of channels and and you know time periods and things like that yeah and keep it flexible now we've got a question i'm gonna go to that and then i think we'll look to round up because we're getting near time so they've asked with the maturity model um so with the model it is so variable across different areas and teams and at what level where do you start i think this can sometimes be an issue for global companies do i just do the uk do i could do it on a global level we've got different teams we've got different parts of the business and so on i think you probably need to do what you can do or i know some have done it cathy you've unmuted yourself that's fatal go on did you want to chip in i'm just going to say for me it was just about starting so um and we're exactly the same so we're a big global company and it was like exactly as you say do we just do the global functions do we just do the markets how do we do it and it really was just a case of what if we start then at least we can get a plan to start to do some stuff and then that snowballs and that starts to to go into people so what my advice would be it doesn't matter just start just start somewhere and you can then you can then change it and move as you as you progress yeah i did the same yeah i would echo that and we started probably within a technology division and then we brought it up bank wide and it's grown and evolved but yeah just that's exactly how we approached it as well the stakeholders that you have the influence of over first of all and the strategy that you can influence and change to start that show best practice there and then move it back out into the rest of the the corporation um sorry i'm gonna darren want to say something but i'm not gonna let him because i'm a bit like that sometimes um we've had one more question coming so i would quite like to get to very quickly are there any specific guidelines or benchmarks around learning accessibility eg the number of different formats we should be producing at the same content eg elearning text audio um but i'm gonna signpost to a resource that is available on our new accessibility training resource which is a resource by sculpt uh worcestershire county council have done some really good basic training um around different areas of things that you need to be thinking about when thinking about accessibility this is mandatory training they've done to their all their colleagues but i think you just need to make sure that it works for as wide a range as possible um with this one darren did you want to come in on that very quickly and then we're going to round up yeah i would try to were possible build it all into your package because i think we have a danger sometimes as saying he is the what one for you know madrid's employees and he's an accessible version and we've been on that journey ourselves and so i think you're right you do need to have a a mixture of content in in e-learning anyway to keep it interesting for a start but i do think that any type of content that you provide needs to be run by people with different disabilities and really test it out like that so small focus groups to do that is is what we've been doing lovely thank you we're going to have to round up now we're at the end of our time um it just leaves me to thank our captioner jen today and our two bsl interpreters who will have done well if they've managed to keep up with me i kept trying to think talk slowly and it's really hard i also want to thank darren sarah denise and kathy for joining us today and thank you for your questions and being a part of this this will be it is recorded and it will be available on our knowledge hub afterwards so thank you everyone ever so much and take care have a good afternoon bye

2022-07-29 03:48

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