Our accessibility roadmap: implementing best practise at Sage

At Sage, it is hair-trigger to us that we implemented serviceability wideness all teams as part of our pledge to make all our products and services wieldy by 2025.

The Web Content Serviceability Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 provide useful information on what to consider when making experiences increasingly accessible. However, as part of our work to introduce serviceability weightier practise to our business, our team at Sage wanted to make the guidelines easier to use.

This involved breaking the guidelines lanugo into a increasingly digestible format that our colleagues would not only understand better, but moreover be worldly-wise to implement them directly into their teams and processes.

Read on to find out how we did this by introducing serviceability weightier practices into our Sage ways of working…

Making wieldy guidelines increasingly accessible

There’s no easy way to put this… the WCAG guidelines are nonflexible to understand.

They’re complex, long, and written in a way that, if you’re not a subject specialist, you’re going to struggle to understand what most of it means. It’s complicated.

At Sage, we are unchangingly looking for ways to unravel lanugo barriers, so it was crucial for us to find a way to indulge colleagues to powerfully understand and use these day-to-day when developing our products and services.

Categorising disabilities and developing personas

After looking into various approaches of how to unravel lanugo the guidelines for ease, we decided to group the guidelines to focus on the disabilities that they assist. This gave us virtually 12 variegated categories that covered most of the WCAG guidelines.

Discussions with Sage colleagues and our User Researcher for the Diamond System Team led to the suggestion of creating some personas slantingly this work. This would help us largest visualise who we are trying to support using the 12 variegated categories.

We moreover developed five serviceability personas which you can read about on our serviceability hub.

The personas; Mary, Manuel, Anne, Ayesha, and David include a mixture of disabilities and serviceability challenges. Each persona covers a unrepealable part of the WCAG guidelines.

Once this was in place, we tackled how to implement this into our relevant teams and products at Sage.

This involved expanding on each of the personas and showing which parts of the WCAG guidelines unromantic to each persona. To help us prioritise, we calculated the unscientific number of users unauthentic in each category.

Applying these tools to create serviceability roadmaps

The unelevated image is an example of the roadmap we have created for the Mary persona. This shows how we tapped this lanugo into various WCAG success criteria that was relevant for this persona.

We then review our products and services versus this persona to ensure we are meeting each zone of criteria. Once we have tackled the pain points for each persona, we can confidently say that our products and services will be increasingly wieldy to users who live with that powerlessness or challenge.

While we cannot categorically ensure that every point on this roadmap is relevant for every person who has Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, or is colour blind, we have worked to group these in an constructive way so that we’re can support as many of their serviceability needs as possible.

Adaptability is the key to accessibility

There are no ‘one size fits all’ solutions when it comes to serviceability so weightier practise involves stuff adaptable. This ensures that our team at Sage can create products and services that are wieldy to all, no matter their level of ability.

It was important from the start to have a well-spoken path of how we are going to wilt a increasingly wieldy business. Having a well-spoken tideway to this when it comes to designing and developing our products and services, is hair-trigger to our journey.

We still have a lot of work to do virtually serviceability at Sage but with the right people and commitment, we will be worldly-wise to unzip our goal.

Find out increasingly well-nigh the work we are doing as a merchantry to modernize serviceability for our customers, colleagues, and partners. Visit our accessibility hub for spare information well-nigh the serviceability of our products, colleague training, and our diamond system.

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