Accessibility Community of Practice

Owned by Caylee Farndon-Taylor (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Feb 20, 2024 by Louise Roddan
3 min read

Description

The accessibility community of practice ("ACoP") will be cross-functional; including representatives not only from Digital but from across Shelter at both a 'maker' and a senior level. This is important so that we can identify opportunities and gaps, and ensure that change and understanding is spread out.

The ACoP will communicate regularly, to produce guidelines and reports on how Shelter can improve its accessibility. This might mean working independently to produce a report on why we need to make our website navigable by keyboard. The ACoP would then pass that on to the relevant product team to prioritise and resolve. Where possible they would also offer support to the product team e.g. helping them to research solutions or source external support. Likewise the ACoP might identify an opportunity to include accessibility rules in our procurement criteria for new tools, and work collaboratively with this team to add it.

The ACoP will meet at least once per quarter, and will likely have to devote a few hours per month to accessibility-led activities. Two ACoP members will be nominated from each Digital community of practice, to ensure all disciplines are represented. These will make up the 'core' members. Members will not be expected to have any specialist accessibility knowledge prior to joining, but will be expected to do training, or devote time to self-train so that they can help advise those they work closely with on accessibility questions.

Other memberships might be temporary (e.g. the procurement team might be involved just during that piece of work) or core (if they represent an area of the organisation not reflected in the group, perhaps because they don't have a community of practice set up yet).

Facilitation and management will be shared (most likely by rotating between the core members). One representative will report updates back to the Digital Leadership Group, to ensure that we have senior support.

ACoP Site

Sharepoint site

Participants

(Contact the UX team for a list of participants)

Roadmap

https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lIRibYQ=/

 

This includes the following upcoming ACoP work:

  • CoP self-learning and development

  • Communicate AA standard to wider organisation

  • Workshops / education of other teams on accessibility best practices

  • Guidelines created for each discipline

  • Development improvements to IG journeys based on Audit

  • Impact review of changes to IG journeys?

  • Define red routes for future audits?

  • Internal audit?

 

Feel free to get started on any of this work, or if you think something is missing please feel free to add it

 

Possible future work:

  • Complete external audit?

  • Improved process for internal reporting of accessibility issues?

  • Improved process for external reporting of accessibility issues?

  • Explore adding accessibility checks to QA / dev processes?

  • Explore adding accessibility checks to procurement processes?

Previous meeting + recordings

Future ACoP meetings

  • 28th October 2021 - Audit work? TBC: Product + Delivery (Jake, Kam, Monique, Sam)

  • 27th January 2022 - Content Design + video (Deborah, Millie)

  • 28th April 2022 - Researchers + Digital Analysts (Sam, Steve)

  • 28th July 2022 - Brand + Creative (Hannah, Laura)

  • 27th October 2022 - Social Media + Marketing (Becky, Bronya, Joe, Spike)

  • 27th January 2023 - UX + Service Design (Lizzie, Luke, Suzanne)

  • April 2023 - QA + Development (Jincy, Sam, James)

 

Ideas for future ACoP sessions

  • Technical learnings from the RNIB accessibility audit