The importance of accessible tech products

Why we’re spending time and money on making our case management system accessible for everyone

In 2021 Citizens Advice offices across England and Wales helped over 2.4 million people with 1-to-1 advice and, just as they do every year, tens of thousands of advisers recorded the details of those individuals and the advice they were given on our in-house case management system.

Casebook, as it’s known, was launched in 2017 and despite being overwhelmingly popular with users, there is one major problem; it is not fully accessible. This means that it limits the ability of people who use assistive technologies and others with additional needs from using it in the same way as someone without those additional needs.

Why does the accessibility of digital tools for staff matter?

More than 1 in 5 working age adults now identify as disabled, yet disabled people are vastly underrepresented in the workplace. While the employment rate of non-disabled people is around 81%, for disabled people the rate is just 53.5%, a fact that hits hard when you realise that living costs are nearly £600 more per month if you’re disabled. After more than 2 years of widespread homeworking, physical mobility is now less of a barrier to the workplace than it has ever been before, but in many cases technological barriers still remain.

Given the chronic staff shortages currently affecting many sectors, there are huge benefits for employers in supporting disabled people into work. However, for us at Citizens Advice it is more personal than that. Equity, diversity and inclusion are core to our being and it is vitally important to us that our staff reflect the people we help, but that can’t happen if disabled colleagues are excluded from using our essential digital tools.

What are we doing about it?

Every aspect of Casebook is designed and developed by in-house teams, but with limited previous experience of web accessibility among us we knew we needed help from the experts. For this, we took a two-pronged approach.

First, we commissioned an audit to benchmark Casebook against the internationally recognised accessibility standards, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), to provide an objective review of our situation and a clear action plan for how to improve. As an organisation, we have committed to meeting the WCAG 2.1 AA standard, but the results of the audit showed that Casebook did not meet even the basic A standard. Our primary problem area was the compatibility of Casebook with screen readers, but it also highlighted issues for those who rely on using the keyboard to navigate (because they don’t use a mouse) and those who use voice controls (because they don’t use either a keyboard or a mouse).

Secondly, we wanted to hear directly from our disabled users, the people who have to contend with the product day to day, to ensure that we are improving the real-life experiences of people using our tools. We decided that the most measurable way to do this was to use surveys to gather a quantitative feedback score alongside qualitative feedback to help us better understand the problems our specific users are facing. Our first survey, carried out in March 2022, showed largely what we expected; that the experience of assistive technology users on Casebook was significantly worse than that of other users. While we scored a respectable 7.8 out of 10 among all users, users of assistive technology rated Casebook just 5 out of 10.

The findings of the audit and the direct feedback from our users really put into perspective the mountain we had to climb, so we doubled down on our commitment and made web accessibility a top priority in the Casebook product roadmap to hold ourselves accountable.

How can you ensure accessibility when using a third party tool?

The huge advantage for Casebook is that it is developed in-house, which allows us to decide our own priorities and focus on accessibility instead of, say, building a new feature. This is a luxury that many teams do not have because they rely on off-the-shelf tools supplied by a third party.

That was exactly the case for our Remote Advice Platforms team, which recently went through the procurement process for a new contact centre platform provider and placed accessibility at the heart of it. In a recent blog post Kylie Havelock, Head of Product, described how the options on the table were severely limited due to a lack of accessible platforms on the market, but this was not immediately apparent. In fact, there are countless businesses that provide contact centre platforms and 35 potential suppliers submitted applications. These 35 were each assessed on the basis of a completed selection questionnaire, which was heavily weighted towards accessibility criteria (two thirds of the requirements fell into this category). However, only 7 were selected to move into the second stage.

Since the selection questionnaire had been based on self-certification, the remaining candidates were assessed by a third party specialist. This further narrowed the field, leaving just 2 suppliers who could actually deliver the AA standard phone platform we were after. The contract was officially awarded to Accenture in spring 2022, but both parties know that accessibility is not something you achieve once then forget, so we have embedded a contractual commitment to maintaining the AA standard for the duration of the contract.

How are we measuring our progress?

On Casebook, after 6 months of a dedicated focus on making accessibility improvements, we recently had it re-tested against the WCAG requirements. We are pleased to be significantly closer to reaching A standard, though our low starting position means we still have a fair way to go. We also know that the standards mean nothing if we are not meeting the specific needs of our users, so in June 2022 we re-surveyed Casebook users, asking them once again to rate their experience out of 10, and the results are promising.

This time around, Casebook overall was rated 8 out of 10, a very small (0.2) improvement from the 7.8 we scored in March. The rating for using Casebook with assistive technology, on the other hand, saw a nearly 50% improvement, increasing from 5 out of 10 in March to 7.3 out of 10 in June. Seeing such a marked improvement in such a short space of time has reinvigorated our drive to make Casebook accessible, and we are excited about where we might be in another 6 months.

If you have experience of building accessible digital products for staff, we would love to hear from you. Feel free to drop me an email. If you are disabled and are interested in working for Citizens Advice do look at our current vacancies.