How To Start An Accessibility Champions Network, The BBC’s Story.

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Level Up Coding

7 min readSep 5, 2021

This is both the history and an outline of the approach of the BBC’s Accessibility Champions Network.

Apologies to Queen for subverting their lyrics and thank you to The Noun Project for the image

Right at the start of my digital accessibility journey at the BBC in 2005 I was given a very simple brief. I had to come up with an approach where we would build accessibility into a product from the start, so everyone could see what good looked like, then find a way of scaling best practice across the whole organisation in a way that was sustainable.

I was told I could hire two people and bring in expertise where necessary. Around that time there were fewer people in the UK who had full-time jobs in accessibility than I had fingers, and as far as I could tell no large content organisations in the UK or anywhere else for that matter had a dedicated digital accessibility lead or team.

There was a new product that was still in its infancy. The team had built a prototype called the Integrated Media Player (iMP) and that would become my first home.
If you haven’t guessed, this product would eventually evolve into the BBC iPlayer, and me and my new accessibility team colleagues, Lucy Pullicino (then Dodd) and Andrew Strachan were asked to research and write the requirements for V1.0
Then take what we were learning and help the rest of the organisation evolve best practice.
If you are interested we had two invited experts at the time, Robin Christopherson and Kevin Carey, whose expertise and support proved invaluable at the time.

Things did not go smoothly at first, not because there was a lack buy-in from the management, but because no-one had built a large scale VOD service before, let alone an accessible one. So we had to feel our way, understanding the UX obstacles and working with the usability and audiences teams to bring real insight and data into the decision making process.
One big problem we had was WCAG. From a VOD service perspective at the time, the guidelines had more holes than Swiss cheese, so we decided to create our own guidelines. These would be a blueprint for accessibility at the BBC, and they would be based on research, they would be objective, usable and testable.

But to understand where the rest of the organisation was at we did a health check audit. We took a few metrics that were easy, such as heading structure, colour contrast and alt-text, and took the time to evaluate 100 pages that had been published in the last 3 months, randomly sampled from accross the estate.
We got 100 results that were completely different. We simply couldn’t find two pages marked-up the same, and I realised at the time we had a big challenge ahead of us.

At this point I decided to reach out and find out if there was anyone else besides our small team that really cared about accessibility.
Apart from a few small teams in the nations, pretty much all the digital teams were in London, so I got permission to send out an internal comms email to find out if there was anyone else out there. I wish I had kept the original email, but it went along the lines of,

“Are you interested in accessibility? I have booked the board room on (date). I will be there on my own with lots of tea and sandwiches. Please come along if you are interested in accessibility or want a free lunch or just feel sorry for me because I haven’t got any friends to have lunch with.”

The day came and I was overwhelmed by the response. Not everyone who wanted to come could attend, but the room was packed with designers, engineers, researchers, product managers… all sorts, all wanting to find out what it was all about.
Some of these people had already started thinking about accessibility and integrating it into their work, and I had the privilege of meeting people who have since become accessibility leaders like Emma Pratt Richens, Al Duggin and Ian Hamilton.
This gathering became the start of my network and was the start of what was called at the time The Accessibility Group. A network of people talking and advising each other, gathering around subjects and helping to implement changes within their own teams. I realised at this point a network of people who did not need persuading, but just needed supporting, would be the key to scaling across the organisation. Their insights and expertise helped guide our activities and gave us an invaluable understanding of the challenges that the product teams faced.

This group taught me so much and I realised that as an accessibility leader I should not be the police, but be a listener, a networker, a dating agent around shared challenges and a curator of expertise.
I could not be precious about what I thought was right, I had to listen to what the group needed. I based my decisions on their feedback and I could use their insight to look for convergent opportunities for change.
By the end of 2008 we had built the BBC Accessibility Guidelines that as well as covering web, also included video on demand, captions, games and fledgling mobile services, all way ahead of what WCAG because we were responding to business need.
WCAG was still being used as a resource, but only as a foundation to build upon.

Then at the end of 2008 I was offered an opportunity to join a team building a new TV platform, and I joined Project Canvas for 2 years, which was later launched as YouView. The Accessibility Team joined the newly formed BBC UX&D team and although YouView was a huge success in terms of accessibility, there were some casualties. Most notably BBC Glow, a project led by Jake Archibald, which would have been the worlds first accessible JavaScript framework. It was brilliant and the act of cancelling without taking the time to appreciate how it would set back the accessibility programme is one of the worst decisions made by the BBC’s management.

I returned in 2011 to an accessibility team that needed a re-boot, a brief to create a design research team and an accessibility network that had been disbanded. I hired and joined forces with Henny Swan and Ian Pouncey to create a new team with a broader remit, and it felt like a fresh start.
We were already talking about creating a new set of mobile specific accessibility guidelines when Al Duggin approached us and asked us for support. Al was principle engineer in BBC Sport and the 2012 Olympics were looming. There was a brief to make them the most accessible Olympics to date and Al’s drive was going to make that happen. Henny took on what could only be described as a mentoring role with Al and in a team meeting we started to wonder how many more Als there were out there. Ian had come from Yahoo where there were the Champions model was used used very successfully for technical expertise, but not accessibility, and the idea dawned on us that we could create a new network along those lines.

This was not going to be a formal network. The previous incarnation of the Accessibility Group had taught us that people who wanted to drive accessibility within their teams needed support and development, and so this would be based on volunteers only.
We would support them through networking, training, a community network channel and events, back them up when they needed and help them on their individual accessibility journeys, and they could be anyone working on customer facing products and services, in any role, with any level of knowledge, as we all have a part to play.

We asked of them 2 things.

Please make sure accessibility is discussed in every sprint so I does ot get deffered
If there is a problem that can’t be resolved, or your team don’t know where to start, bring it back to the group.

To cope with the scale of the group it would need a manager which started as a part-time responsibility, but quickly became a full-time role. Henny, Ian, Jamie, Emma and the current manager, Charlie, have all brought their individual flair and it has been about support, mentoring, training opportunity and culture.

This is by no means the only way of establishing or managing a network, and in recent years there are great models for networks that have come from Intuit, Google, Microsoft, Barclays and more, where they have taken the idea and reshaped it to fit with their organsiation’s culture, expectations and practices.
So if you have a fledgeling network or are thinking about starting one, have a look around at the different approaches and create a model that sits neatly within your organisation. There is no off-the-shelf approach to this, because like people, organisations are all different, but the one thing I would recommend is that you start by reaching out and finding your tribe, and ask them what they need, and never stop ensuring that your network is as inclusive and supportive as it can possibly be.

If you are interested in any of the BBC’s resources, here are a few, and none of this would have been possible without the expertise, input, feedback and support from the members of the BBC’s networks.

How To Start An Accessibility Champions Network, The BBC’s Story.

Written by Gareth Ford Williams