Karl Goldstraw - Design system accessibility specialist

"Accessibility is important" Don't just say it, do it

2025-05-01T00:00:00Z

I'm seeing more and more posts about the importance of digital accessibility, and quite frankly that's pretty awesome! Clearly I'm not the only one.

There's (thankfully) a growing awareness that everyone deserves equal access to online information. However, there's a subtle but significant gap emerging: the difference between saying accessibility is important and demonstrating it.

It's becoming increasingly common to see individuals and organisations publicly championing accessibility, yet a quick glance at their portfolio or social media posts sometimes reveals a different story:

Missing alt text on images
Colour combinations with poor contrast, or;
A lack of clear heading structures

None of us are perfect

This isn't about policing, pointing fingers or demanding absolute perfection. We're all on different learning curves, and the world of accessibility is constantly evolving.

Your own digital presence serves as an example of your values — it's often the first thing people see when they Google you. If you genuinely believe in accessibility, your website, portfolio and social media become the prime opportunities to showcase your principles in action.

By making sure your own content is as accessible as possible, you not only benefit those with disabilities but also reinforce your public commitment to inclusivity in a really credible way. Those that know, know this.

So, how can we bridge this gap without sounding accusatory?

Try framing your promotion of accessibility as a shared journey of learning and improvement.

It's really really OK to say "I don't know and I want to learn" or "I found this thing out and I wanted to share it". For me, the tone of educating others when you're not experienced feels awkward and misleading, and it's not cool.

We can highlight the benefits of accessible design for everyone, not just those with disabilities.
We can share resources and tips for implementing basic accessibility practices.
We can lead by example, ensuring our own digital footprints reflect the accessibility standards we advocate for.

Try to move beyond simply shouting #AccessibilityMatters and strive to be seen to be saying it through consistent action.

Practice what you preach, and be honest about it.

This was first published as an article on LinkedIn.

This is just an idea: SPACE Accessibility

2024-12-05T00:00:00Z

I love writing posts on LinkedIn about ideas that pop into my head, but this one got a bit long and needed some formatting so I wrote a page. Lucky you, more drivel, but this time long drivel.

I've long had this idea about a learning utopia for people who can't afford accessibility courses or certification. I know there's people out there doing it, so this is an addition to that thinking — I know it's not ground breaking.

Self-paced, Accessibility Capability Evaluation Model: or SPACE model.

(yeah I know, the name could be better but I literally just made it up)

It's a product where someone could take a wonderful questionnaire type experience like Ashley Peacock recently created, and make an open-source certification, membership and open learning pathway with mentorship at every stage.

It would be something created, maintained and moderated by all, like people already with the certification mentor you and then you take the tests in your own time and at your own pace. Your score and thus certification comes from how well you do, bit like at university, with first class honours, 2nd class etc (maybe).

Here's the details spilling out of my tiny brain:

It's open source

Accessibility learning should be a right, not a privilege. Free, open-source learning resources would ensure less barriers to entry, things like resources, study guides hosted and community contributed to by members from a group such as CAN members.

(ps — I've not spoken to anyone at CAN about this, I'm just freestyling on my keyboard whilst watching I'm a Celebrity).

It's self-paced learning

This part acknowledges the diversity in learning styles, cognitive needs and life circumstances. I haven't done a moderated test since my A-levels (that's about 17 years old in the UK, and now I'm a grey old 40 something). You'd have modular learning pathways with bite-sized snippets of topics. Including videos, audio transcripts, and the aforementioned interactive quizzes, which meet varied user needs. Not everyone is the same, and learning is scary.

It's a mentorship model

Mentoring from a group of cool people creates a sense of community and support. It's also a very powerful way to pass on expertise. Using something like ADPList would work well for this (it's free and I think accessible).

It's inclusive evaluation

Let's say we just all hate tests. Having a set date, that date approaching, cramming and stress ensues. Unnecessary cognitive load, dyslexia, anxiety are just some reasons why it's exclusionary to have a set date (remember your driving test anyone?). I'd suggest things like Ashley's questionnaire, or portfolio building case studies that you can build and chat through with a mentor and could be peer reviewed to give you practical insight, and then something to show off. The ultimate questionnaire gives you your score and thus certification.

How would you ensure integrity?

We'd reinforce the ethos that this is about self-improvement rather than just credentials. If someone deceived the certification (eg DuckDuckGo'ed the answers) then they'd only be deceiving themselves.

Karl, this is well flawed

Probably but you know what, we shouldn't stifle optimism with barriers said a great man.

Problems I could potentially foresee:

Quality control (community contribution models here, peer reviews etc)
Sustaining interest (ideas like these are side of desk without somebody pumping it with sponsorship. And people are busy)
[Something else here, when I think of it]

But open source FTW.

Accessibility learning should be a right, not a privilege.

This was first published as an article on LinkedIn.

Our Accessibility Strategy for HL

2024-12-04T00:00:00Z

The point of this article is to tell you how we, the accessibility team at Hargreaves Lansdown, made our accessibility strategy, and hopefully it's helpful to you, the reader, in helping you to define your own accessibility strategy.

Zoe Coles (Portlock) and I make up the centralised accessibility team, and we have a wonderful group of people around us working side-of-desk, including our AWG (Accessibility Working Group) and our Accessibility Ambassadors network.

This strategy is a culmination of everyone's hard work towards making our services work better for not just disabled people, but for everyone. This is for everyone.

First, some context

At HL you might have heard in the news we're going through some change, we're being bought by some different folk who will take us into being a privately owned company.

It's really exciting to think what awesome things might be ahead. But we all know change can be uncertain and take a long time and new priorities might be either around the corner or down the road.

So as part of our commitment to accessibility we've designed a two-year plan that will give us a solid base whilst we see through this change.

Also, there's a lot of work to do.

Self reflection

Before we got into this, we really had to do some self reflection.

We'd done some accessibility maturity modelling previously to this. I can't speak highly enough for baselining your efforts with a maturity model. There's lots of ones out there:

AbilityNet have an easy to understand DAMM (Digital Accessibility Maturity Model)
Business Disability Forum have a great Self Assessment tool
W3C accessibility maturity model is probably the most open-source, but it's complex

Knowing where you are means you know where you're going

It's tough to look at yourself objectively, but ultimately you have to remember that when things aren't as rosy as you'd like, you have a target to aim for and a reason to prioritise, it might even be a good reason to get your sponsor to give you more budget for people and things.

In our quest for self reflection we started by chatting to our colleagues. At HL we have a really vibrant user centred design team and asking them to see or share something is never an issue.

We spoke with product folk, user researchers, vulnerable client representatives, and ultimately clients themselves. (We call our customers, clients). We're an organisation that really looks after our clients' needs and each other, and that makes doing great work possible. Our values or principles are:

Client first
Show Courage
Always Curious
Care Deeply
One Team

And I like that I work for an organisation that publicly supports these empathetic views for people rather than features.

As a centralised accessibility team we have access to our Accessibility Working Group, an Accessibility Ambassadors network and a backlog of absolutely incredible client feedback — when I say incredible, I mean it's constructive and we always hear something we didn't know before. Kudos to our user research team, they mean we're able to dig deep for insight across the organisation.

We ran a survey and retro with our Accessibility Ambassadors to really understand what they need and what differing areas of the business need.

We, as a centralised accessibility team of two, can't be everywhere all of the time and so our Ambassadors are the eyes and ears we don't have, reaching deep into all corners of the business. We will write an article soon about our Ambassadors, they're really awesome and for side-of-desk input, we're really spoilt.

Knowing where you are means you know where you're going and it means you truly understand client (user) impact. After all, clients are the heart of everything we do and the reason we exist. Imagine if our strategy outcomes make more money accessible to more people — that's the hope.

Defining our Accessibility Strategy

There's really two facets to this:

Firstly having self reflected, as the accessibility experts in your organisation you'll pretty much know your desired outcomes for users and the chances are your intuition will be good.
But you can't just float away in any direction to do whatever you want. User needs are important and you have to consider the direction set out by your organisation and match your priorities against those too.

It's never exactly pretty, or easy to do, but adding your strategy under the right pillars and values set out by the business means you can more easily assess your ROI (Return On Investment) in a language that the business understands.

Also if you get stuck in the lift with the CEO you want to be able to say how you're working under their leadership and the value you're bringing them. It sounds shallow, but it's a necessity when working in any sector where you're given money to do a thing (so everywhere).

I'm not sure I can share all the HL strategy here, but our target is under a strategic pillar called 'Increase retention' — we strongly believe our clients will value us more if we have an accessible platform. We have quotes from clients saying they value our accessibility efforts and therefore trust us with their money. And it's usually a lot of money so we don't take it lightly.

HL deal with pensions, savings and investments. Our pension clients are with us for the long term, so if we don't have accessible services then we won't retain their business.

Accessibility isn't only for people who are disabled right now, it's for our future selves

Structuring our strategy

So, I suppose this is where you probably skipped to ;)

We split our strategy into four parts:

A vision statement
Work categorisation: The Three C's
Objectives and initiatives
Desired outcomes

A vision statement: What is it?

A vision statement is a declaration of your ultimate goal and aspiration. It paints a picture of our organisation's desired future state and provides a guiding star for decision-making and strategic planning via our accessibility team's work.

We think a vision statement should:

Motivate and inspire stakeholders to work towards a common goal
Set a high bar and encourage continuous improvement
Be easy to understand and communicate
Focus on the desired future state, not the current reality

Our vision statement

The Three C's of Accessibility

If you've not seen Craig Abbott's Defining a strategy for accessibility, then you're missing out. We used this as a basis for our own (thanks Craig). As with all things Craig writes, it's a very good read. He sets out his 3 pillars as:

Compliance
Culture
Education

But we like alliterations, and so we changed Education to Capability.

This probably sounds like a shallow decision, but in all honesty we felt that Capability had wider meaning and was more reflective in performance of more things than just people learning things. For example, measuring the Capability of a team. Kudos to Tom Carrington for this suggestion.

Compliance, Capability and Culture as a Venn diagram

Compliance focuses on ensuring that all products, services, and environments meet relevant accessibility standards and regulations such as WCAG 2.2, the Equality Act and Consumer Duty. It involves conducting audits, wide scale testing, and remediation to address accessibility barriers that people face.

Capability emphasises raising awareness and building knowledge about accessibility throughout the organisation. It includes role specific training, providing resources, and promoting inclusive design principles for client work.

Culture aims to create organisational culture that embraces accessibility in our day to day. Events with guest speakers, mentoring, disability language and etiquette. These all help to create a mindset where responsibility for accessibility is shared and it is considered an integral part of our processes. We already captured hearts and minds this year, with a guest talk from Gareth Ford Williams for GAAD (Global Accessibility Awareness Day) Foundation.

One for all and all for one

All three C's are important individually yet rely on each other to deliver a sustained and resilient strategy over time that puts the needs of our clients and colleagues first.

Each one has an important role to play, I'll explain what happens when we remove one of the C's. Spoiler alert: It's not good.

The three C's showing the negative that happens when the third isn't present

Without compliance we become ineffective. Good intentions and awareness alone aren't enough. Without adhering to WCAG standards and legal requirements, we won't truly address accessibility barriers, and we may even create new ones.

Without capability we become inconsistent. Without capability and training, people's efforts will be based on their own assumptions or biases rather than genuine knowledge. This creates inconsistencies in the way issues are found, changed or improved.

Without culture we get inaction. A lack of buy-in to a culture of accessibility leads to resistance, minimal effort, and a "tick-box" mentality. We want colleagues to feel inspired and left wanting to do the right thing.

Objectives and Initiatives

I won't be able to show these publicly, because they are initiatives born out of our own research, and frankly, they'll be irrelevant to you and your users anyway.

But it's stuff like:

Improving automated test reporting and tooling (Compliance)
Building skill progression frameworks and role specific training (Capability)
Inspiring colleagues to do good, not telling them to do good (Culture)

Within these objectives and their initiatives we've detailed measurements, because without ways to measure how will we know how we did? Some are meticulous numbers and some are very simple, for example: Number of colleagues trained in [X, Y and Z] went up by...

For KPI's (Key Performance Indicators) and ways to measure your progress I highly recommend you speak to your product folk, we have some great product people who are keen Accessibility Ambassadors, shout outs to Luke Albest and Claire Barry for this help.

Expected outcomes

We thought long and hard about the outcomes we expected from our work over the next two years. Not only does this need to link to client needs but also business needs and we think we've hypothesised some pretty good outcomes that are a mix of both.

We work remotely, so we can't stick them up as posters around the office, you can call me a hippy, but these are flash cards I actually have on my desk. They're key reminders to keep going for those days when burnout is looming.

We will see improved ownership and responsibility. Accessibility will become integral, not an afterthought or a burden. We will have a proactive and sustainable approach to accessible products and services.

We will enhance internal expertise. Teams will actively build and share accessibility expertise, creating a ripple effect that enhances HL's approach overall to accessibility.

We will boost morale. People will feel valued, motivated by inclusive design, and that they're making a positive impact (and reducing ambassador imposter syndrome).

We will build trust. We will build trust with clients and colleagues by showing that we are actively tracking and improving our performance relative to competitors.

We will mitigate risk. Through engaging with clients, we will swiftly identify legal and reputational risks.

We will attract and retain talent. Through a public commitment to accessibility, we will attract and retain talent who value inclusivity and social responsibility.

We will stay current. Through relationships with our industry peers, we will keep up with evolving accessibility standards and technologies, so HL remains competitive.

We will create better outcomes for clients. All clients, especially disabled clients will feel confident, valued and fully ready to engage with our products and services.

What's next?

We're building a roadmap, with our Objectives and Initiatives at the core.

We'll set milestones and set up engagement with the right people at the right times. We have an internal monthly newsletter that we'll use to help drive engagement with colleagues about our progress. We believe that transparency is the key to successful outcomes.

We'll also be setting up our KPI's and not be those people that look back at the end of the year to panic and fill out all at once. It's better to fill out as you go, and communicate it.

If you're still here, (this is a long read, eh) we can add some past-tenses to our Three C's to show where we intend to be at:

Compliant. Be far closer to all our products and services will meet, and ideally exceed the expectations set out by accessibility standards and regulations such as WCAG, Consumer Duty and Equality Act.

Capable. Everyone will be able to easily access insights, internal training and resources giving them the confidence to create accessible digital experience by default.

Cultured. From the CEO to interns, more people will understand and want to champion accessibility not as a feature, but as a mindset. People will feel inspired to act.

Are you thinking of making your own strategy?

To try and summarise my points, it's probably best that I frame it in a way that helps you get started on making your own strategy:

Remind yourself (and your audience: organisation, stakeholders) why accessibility is important
Frame where you are in your accessibility journey. Be honest about it, even if you're an established team. Just because there's loads to do just means there's loads to do, not that you're not doing well enough. And there is always loads to do.
Tell your organisation how your strategy will benefit them. Tell them about the people it serves and the impact for users. Work out the ROI (return on investment) and the business case for accessibility. User needs are ultimately key, but users spend money (and businesses like money!).
Look at strategies out there that already exist. Ask around, DuckDuckGo it — there's a lot of resources out there. Remember we started with Craig Abbott's take on it.
Speak to your users and colleagues, speak to disabled people. Find out what you know you don't know. Don't ever use a robot, regardless of what these AI companies are telling/selling you.
Hypothesise your outcomes, and then fill in the gaps of how you'll get there. Get the post it notes out and stick them on a wall (like every UX designer's website ever, lol). Jake Knapp's Day 1 Sprint planning is a good illustration of this.
Have fun with it. We had so much fun with this work, we went on a real self-discovery journey and the benefits of that are untold.

Good luck, and if you fancy a chat I'm on ADPList. I'm always happy to have a virtual coffee.

This was first published as an article on LinkedIn.

How to become an accessibility designer for free

2024-02-27T00:00:00Z

I've been asked by a couple of lovely people how they might 'break into' being an accessibility designer. I'm keen to hear other people's advice too, but here's some things I've said to people.

Ps — this is not meant as a one-size fits all article, it's just some of my thoughts whilst pushing a sandwich into my face...

Learn some WCAG foundations

For this I'd recommend looking at the WCAG but in a translated piece so it doesn't overwhelm you.

Martin Underhill has written an awesome blog post about the WCAG in a language he understands
Stark have a wonderful set of guides about WCAG explained
The WCAG quickref is the guides in a raw but digestible format

Learn about people

Volunteer. I personally did some volunteering with BlindAid back in 2018 (before I had kids and thus had spare time) and it was the best experience of my life. I received sight-guide training and was assigned to a lovely person who I helped every week including socials or appointments.
Seek lived experiences. Whilst volunteering, I learnt that multiuse pavements are terrible for guide dogs (no pavement edge to follow). I learnt that people with complete blindness don't have the light on at home and thus can put themselves at risk of burglary as the house can look empty. I learnt that London's ever changing shops can be confusing for someone so used to walking a certain path and counting on smells and sounds at certain points/stops of a journey. It's these things you can't learn online. If you don't have lived experience, talk to those that do.
Join user research. If you have any opportunities at work, join user research sessions. Accessibility is essentially a subset of usability.
Learn about people. Disability isn't something only permanently disabled people have. It can be temporary or situational and that can show in user sessions. Learn about people.
Don't assume that the things you've learnt now make you the expert, you'll never be the expert. The Dunning-Kruger effect is real.

Don't always look for an accessibility role right away

Build on what you already have. If you're in a role you enjoy, stick with it and bring accessibility-lead thinking into that role, advocacy is hard and can make you feel burnt out sometimes.
Be the champion of accessibility in your team, then ask your boss to expense something, then write a letter a week to a stakeholder to give you some budget (Remember Andy in Shawshank?). Make a bit of a nuisance of yourself but do it in a way that you can show the value of good accessibility — Not everyone will see it like you do.
Habit stacking makes it a little easier. Bring an accessibility thing you solved to your show and tell as often as you can.
Be persistent. Be the person in your team who makes those that don't care or perhaps understand accessibility, roll their eyes at you. (I'm happy to say that doesn't often happen though).
Question social constructs. Be that person who always says, "Yeah but what about someone who can't see your beautiful visual, what is beauty to them?" This shows a deeper empathetic understanding of why we do accessible design.
Be the person who champions user centred design.

Sign up for some communities

There's a Web-a11y Slack channel
The Champions of Accessibility network run by awesome people like Heather Hepburn
The Dead-bird app also has some nice A11y communities if you're able to wade through the Elon induced fascism to find them. (I'm not linking to that site here).

Find a mentor

I have an awesome mentor. Having someone to speak to about accessibility lead topics and development is so valuable. I need to make more use of this resource to be honest. But it's been so good. Find a mentor you click with.

Learn a screen reader

Don't assume that how you learn to use a screen reader is how everyone uses one. Your volunteering and user research participation will teach you that.
A few years old now, but Rob Dodson's A11ycasts are a precious bookmark I refer back to time and time again.
I personally use VoiceOver on a Mac/iPhone and I use NVDA (free) on a PC.
Don't forget other types of assistive tech!
Visit accessibility empathy labs, such as the GOV empathy lab, NHS empathy lab or Christopher Patnoe's Google Accessibility Discovery Centre (ADC) — I've been with my colleague Zoe Coles (Portlock) and it's absolutely fantastic.

Avoid quick fixes

Don't get sucked in by the accessibility vendors selling you Overlays or overnight courses.
Bootcamps are rubbish, and expensive. Everything you need is out there for the cost of your own time.
Speak to people and learn at your own pace.
Find something you're passionate about and hit it like a steam train. Don't worry about what others are blogging about or what's 'Trending'. I hate those things, because they're normally suggested by companies or people that have some sort of underlying financial gain.

Connect with accessibility folk

Ask for an IRL or virtual coffee, people might have some time if you ask nicely.
Some design people I follow and hugely respect are Shaun Conner, Martin Underhill, Craig Abbott, Heather Hepburn, 🦞 Todd Libby (thanks for the stickers Todd), Zoe Coles (Portlock), Eric Eggert, Gareth Ford Williams, Alistair Duggin, Anna Cook, M.S., Molly Watt, Chris Bush — But this isn't everyone, just those who dropped out of my brain right now.
There's a Webring club with loads more awesome people on it

If anyone is actually still reading this, (my own short attention span is telling me to go and watch a road rage video on YouTube). Then please get in touch. I'd love to know what others are finding useful, or advising other people on.

This was first published as an article on LinkedIn.