Royal Mail reach everyone in the UK 6 days per week. This creates a huge social obligation to be accessible to all. As a founding member of the Business Disability Forum (BDF), they wanted to ensure technology is easier for everyone to use.

Reality didn’t match up to Royal Mail Group’s vision, with an inconsistent approach where accessibility was usually an afterthought on a project, leading to expensive fixes.

Our approach

Royal Mail required a modern and practical approach to building accessible digital products and services. This included strategic and tactical accessibility considerations to ensure Royal Mail’s continued commitment to accessibility can be cost-effectively embedded into their development process.

In order to take Royal Mail on the journey to achieving accessible and inclusive products, we needed to understand the current state of digital accessibility. From this point, we identified the short and long-term objectives and delivered a vision, framework, and processes for cost-effective adoption.

Our approach led Royal Mail through a three-stage process to provide an effective accessibility strategy to embed accessibility and inclusivity across the business.

Three steps to embed accessibility

The team worked as part of the digital team in Royal Mail’s Farringdon office. They designed a 3 step plan to help embed accessibility:

1. Current state: Understand the current state of digital accessibility in Royal Mail to ensure the strategy we develop is fit for purpose and would get buy-in from stakeholders. We defined project goals, explored the current approach, understanding, and view of accessibility across the business, evaluated any existing policies, and secured senior commitment and backing.

2. Future state: We then defined the short and long-term goals of accessibility for Royal Mail. We established the team and key points of contact to ensure that an accessibility strategy has the best opportunity for success. We defined accessibility objectives and aligned objectives with key stakeholders. We identified tools, processes, and development resources to support accessibility goals and initiated accessibility strategy communications.

3. Accessibility framework: Finally, we delivered the accessibility framework born out of the research. We defined how to align all existing and future products and services, supported the creation of a policy stating Royal Mail’s commitment to accessibility, and facilitated knowledge transfer.

Outcome

Our impact has been felt across the entire business. Accessibility has been successfully embedded into the process. It is now considered at the start of a process rather than an afterthought before a new development goes live. The team are quickly able to identify the requirements for each development and ensure that these are baked into the process.

This process has stopped Royal Mail from wasting time and money by ensuring developments are in the right direction. By incorporating accessibility requirements from the very beginning, they are making greater progress more cheaply and with less risk than ever before.