Feature
Is your digital workplace accessible to people with disabilities? Few digital workplace professionals would confidently declare that their digital workplace is fully accessible or even follow the Web Content Accessibility (WCAG) 2.2 guidelines.
Accessibility has traditionally been an area where digital workplace teams have struggled. In 2023, Reworked concluded that work remains to improve digital workplace accessibility.
Have we made some progress since then?
Some digital workplace teams are committed to improving accessibility and working to meet WCAG guidelines. Some high-profile tech vendors have also made real strides to make more inclusive workplace technology.
In the customer experience world, the annual WebAIM Million survey looks at the accessibility of the top million website homepages. It paints a dismal picture of the state of website accessibility, with 94.8% of homepages still not meeting the WCAG 2 guidelines. Over six years, this has reduced only from 97.8%, although web pages have gotten more complex over this period.
Unfortunately, no equivalent survey is done for accessible work software, but given that digital workplaces have arguably become more complex too, the assumption has to be that collective progress is just as limited.
Arguments for Improving Digital Workplace Accessibility
If we assume that most digital workplaces aren’t accessible, there is a real disconnect between the obvious need for accessibility and the lack of progress made. The arguments for ensuring the digital workplace and its constituent tools are accessible are clear and obvious:
- To ensure compliance with a range of legislation such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) or the European Accessibility Act — alongside a range of state, country and sector-specific regulations — that demands accessibility standards (generally AA level of the WCAG 2 guidelines) are met.
- To support inclusion in the workplace, which research has shown has multiple benefits.
- To attract and support talent and ensure employees can carry out their role, noting that the proportion of employees with disabilities in the workforce is high (the World Health Organization estimates 16% of the global population has a “significant” disability).
- For greater usability and a better employee experience for everybody.
- Because being seen to exclude and discriminate against employees with disabilities is bad from a brand and reputation perspective.
- Because it is the right thing to do and most organizations are committed to behaving ethically and responsibly.
Organizations Committed to a More Accessible Digital Workplace
The focus on creating more inclusive workplaces over the last few years has often incorporated a commitment to improve accessibility.
For example, U.S.-based life insurance and financial services provider MassMutual has made considerable progress in having a more accessible digital workplace over the past few years.
“Digital accessibility is very important to us,” said Betsy Codding, head of digital communications and multimedia at MassMutual. “For many years, we’ve strived to create an environment that is inclusive for our employees and having an accessible digital workplace is part of that.”
How MassMutual Improved Digital Workplace Accessibility
The digital workplace team at MassMutual found that achieving compliance and improving accessibility across the digital workplace requires ongoing work and attention.
The team has committed to being WCAG 2.1 compliant on the intranet, with a view to achieving 2.2 in the future, said Codding, who is responsible for MassMutual’s intranet. While tactics improve accessibility, it starts with a mindset.
“We’ve tried to make inclusion and accessibility very much part of our team culture,” Codding said. “We’re also lucky in that we’ve had some great partnerships across MassMutual with teams who share the same aspiration.”
Cross-Departmental Collaboration on Accessibility Goals
Strong working relationships with colleagues in digital marketing and user experience who have already made external-facing sites accessible, as well as fellow support functions like HR and IT, help, Codding said.
MassMutual’s employee resource group for people with disabilities has also offered essential practical advice and testing. Codding’s team also trained intranet content owners to improve their awareness of accessibility issues and practices to make their intranet content more inclusive.
While MassMutual’s core systems also provide good support for accessibility out of the box, the company’s Akumina-powered intranet has a considerable amount of custom code. Here, MassMutual’s internal developers have worked to ensure accessibility is included in the platform.
How Accessibility Influences App Design
Accessibility has also influenced intranet design decisions, such as redesigning core navigation, information graphics and even iconography to be more inclusive, said Mario Pereira, MassMutual’s senior digital designer.
Pereira is also part of a wider group of designers, product owners and IT colleagues who are looking at ways to improve accessibility across the organization.
“We have an internal group dedicated to investigating and implementing better accessibility practices, cultural awareness and technology solutions,” Pereira said. “We’re looking at automated tools as well as trying to make accessibility more a part of MassMutual culture.”
Make Accessibility Part of Vendor Engagements
Another core tactic is to ensure that new technology vendors are also committed to accessibility. MassMutual routinely asks vendors to explain how they will support accessibility standards, and is also getting that topic inserted into MassMutual’s standard vendor engagement template, Pereira said.
Despite making advances in having accessible systems, and creating an accessibility-first culture, there is still a lot of work to do, Codding said, adding that it is an “ongoing journey” that needs constant attention.
“As standards change and as technology changes, it’s so important to stay continually committed to inclusion and accessibility,” Pereira agreed. “You can’t look at it as a ‘one and done’ kind of thing because we’re always adding new content and features to the site — and they need to be accessible, too.”
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Some Tech Vendors Adding Accessibility
Some of the major technology vendors have also attempted to make their offerings accessible, although this has its limits.
Providers such as Microsoft and Salesforce are making a conscious effort to improve the accessibility of their products, said Lawrence Shaw, CEO of AAANow, who has been producing accessibility compliance software for more than two decades. “Products are now a lot more proactive in helping you, and will prompt you if there’s an accessibility issue,” he said. “Up until very recently, the concept of what you had to do or why was hidden. We have made progress, but there’s still a lot of work to do.”
Lisa Riemers, a digital workplace and communications consultant who has just co-written a book on accessible communications, agrees that things have improved. She cites examples such as an accessibility checker that has been rolled out to SharePoint and is already in the Microsoft Office suite as well as resources from Microsoft that provide advice on making their products and content more accessible.
But she notes accessibility support from tech providers is variable. “There are some vendors and agencies who still haven’t even really considered it,” Riemers said. “I saw one product recently that didn’t even provide a field to add descriptive alternative text to images.”
Progress toward an accessible digital workplace is not only affected by variability across products, but also by the increasingly complex nature of the digital workplace, with employees having to navigate a plethora of cloud-based apps with inconsistent interfaces, leading to fragmented and frustrating user experiences.
An article from accessibility professional Barry Hill, who is also visually impaired and uses a screen reader to assist in using digital workplace tools, provides a sobering reality check on how inaccessible the digital workplace is.
Some well-known enterprise tools have accessibility issues — for example, a number of whiteboard applications, Hill said. But “hidden barriers” in major digital workplace tools that claim to be accessible, including Microsoft Teams, Google Docs and Confluence, still cause problems. More problems are also caused by updates that do not appear to have been properly tested for accessibility.
The Challenge of Inaccessible Intranet Content
One major problem with digital workplace accessibility — particularly in intranets or knowledge bases — is that while the platform that houses the content might be accessible, the content added is not.
“The most accessible products can still be banjaxed by inaccessible content,” Riemers said.
Poor content practices include missing alternative text for images, inaccessible PDF documents, poorly written content that causes readability challenges and color-contrast issues on pages, Riemers said.
“Color contrast is one of the biggest challenges,” Riemers said. “Using inaccessible color contrast within buttons, like white text on a gray background, or light blue on a blue background, makes it hard to read for a lot of people.”
As much as 80% of accessibility issues are content-related, Shaw said. Foregoing relatively small changes has a huge impact on people who rely on assistive technology, he said.
“Just doing the basics make a real difference,” Shaw said. “If you don’t put labels on forms, a blind person can’t use assistive technologies to fill it in. If you don't put a label on a link, it’s like having a signpost with no directions on it.”
Adding accessible content is more than remembering basics like adding alt text. It’s also important to use inclusive language, Riemers said. Calling something “dumb,” or being “blind” to something, is ableist language, she said.
Where AI Can Help Improve Digital Workplace Accessibility
With digital accessibility a long-term challenge, solutions that help detect and solve issues increasingly incorporate AI to help.
These AI-assisted accessibility solutions make a difference, particularly in issues that affect content, Shaw said. “Technology and automation can help you achieve substantial conformance at a scale and consistency that is impossible to achieve with just human effort,” he said. “AI provides us with the opportunity for accessibility to no longer be a big, onerous problem.”
But while technology has a role to play, involving users is still important, Riemers said. “There's lots of digital, automated tools available that can certainly help with accessibility, but testing it with actual humans will always find things that you won't expect,” she said.
Digital Workplace Accessibility Improvements Still Needed
While we may have made some progress in improving digital workplace accessibility, in reality this is variable, and collectively, the advances made are limited. This is borne out by the real-world experiences of disabled people excluded from the digital workplace.
But perhaps there is some cause for optimism. Some vendors have improved their accessibility support, although problems remain. Some organizations like MassMutual are working to embed a commitment to accessibility into the culture of the teams and into their practices. Additionally, monitoring tools that incorporate AI could help solve some of the everyday content issues that drive poor accessibility, while legislation continues to emphasize compliance.
When it comes to digital accessibility, there is still a lot of work to be done. And as an industry and professional community, it's up to us to ensure that happens.
