Last reviewed: May 2024

Introduction 

Procurement is an area of huge importance for disability inclusion – but it is often overlooked because it is outside the business areas of disability inclusion professionals. 

The technologies you procure must work for disabled people. This is a legal requirement, but it also makes business sense. Your disabled employees need to be able to work at their best, and they need accessible technologies to do this, rather than being hampered by inaccessible technologies. Similarly, there is nothing to be gained by turning away disabled customers because you’ve procured technologies that don’t work for them. 

The benefits of inclusive technology procurement 

Given that the technology you procure must work for disabled people, you have two options: 

• Un-inclusive procurement – Add fixes, patches, retrofits and replacements as you realise the technology you have procured does not work, or; 
• Inclusive procurement – Follow procurement procedures that allow you to acquire technology that works, avoiding the extra cost and time involved in retrofitting. 

It’s clear which of these is preferable. It is estimated that retrofitting issues relating to compliance or legal complaints can cost up to 100 times more than building in accessibility from the earliest phase. Clearly, establishing procurement policies and procedures that get it right first time has huge value. 

The law 

In the UK and many other jurisdictions, organisations are legally responsible for ensuring that the products and services they procure from external suppliers are accessible and do not discriminate against disabled people.  

It does not matter that you did not create the technology yourselves. If the technology or the way that it is deployed to employees or customers creates barriers for disabled people, you may be legally at risk.  

Therefore, inclusive technology procurement is a vital part of compliance. 

How does inclusive technology procurement work? 

There are a number of elements involved in ensuring technology procurement is inclusive for disabled people. 

Where to start 

We recommend a few first steps to begin on a journey towards inclusive technology procurement. 

• Adopt the Accessible Technology Charter – This is a document that signals your organisation’s commitment to accessible technology. One of the ten commitments in this Charter is to ‘purchase solutions which are as accessible as possible.’ 
• Executive declaration – We strongly recommend that you also make a formal public executive declaration of commitment to procure accessible technology. This helps spread awareness of its importance within the organisation. It can also help persuade reluctant colleagues, who may not yet realise the importance of inclusive technology procurement. Finally, anyone in the organisation who is being challenged on why they are prioritising digital accessibility in procurement, can respond by referring to the executive declaration. 
• Questions for a supplier – We set out a list of basic questions to ask suppliers in our resource ‘Inclusive technology procurement – Where to start.’ This is a starting point. As your organisation matures in its knowledge and experience of procurement, you can develop more detailed and sophisticated questions that cater to your needs as an organisation. 

Our resource, ‘Inclusive technology procurement – Where to start’ has more information. 

Inclusive procurement policies and procedures 

Your organisations policies and procedures on tech procurement should be guided towards procuring inclusive technology. 

The process of procurement includes a wide range of steps: 

• Defining need – How do you find out what your users need? Our resources, ‘Staff consultation methods’ and ‘Customer consultation methods’ have more information. 
• Creating the specification – The specification you send to suppliers must be explicit and detailed about how the procured technology will work for disabled users. Our resource, ‘Request for proposal,’ has more information.  
• Be specific about what your needs are, so if you are sourcing a managed learning solution, that you know will have video content, clearly state that you’ll need this to be captioned, with a transcript, and any other accessibility features you need are included. Being specific about your needs will also reduce the risk of misunderstanding. Terms such as ‘accessible’ can have different meanings to different people, and could be interpreted as ‘being available on different devices’, rather than ‘accessible to people with disabilities’. 
• Selecting suppliers and awarding the contract – Your team must be equipped to analyse bids critically. They should only award contracts to suppliers they are certain will deliver an inclusive product. Don’t expect your procurement colleagues or the commissioning manager to be the expert on this, involve your digital accessibility colleagues in assessing a product.  
• Monitoring performance – Ensure that suppliers are meeting the accessibility standards you set out. Take appropriate steps if this does not happen – such as supporting the supplier to improve their knowledge, suspending the contract while issues are addressed, or cancelling the contract if they are unable to meet your standards. 

Business Disability Forum Partners can access our Procurement Toolkit, which has more information in the resource, ‘Procuring technology.’ 

Testing for accessibility 

Test products and services for accessibility throughout the procurement process: 

• Test products on the market to identify common problems and solutions to accessibility-related issues. 
• Test potential suppliers’ products and services before selecting or rejecting their bid. 
• It could be part of the contract for them to provide external accessibility testing themselves, and provide evidence of this. 
• Test products and services delivered by the successful bidder, before deploying to employees and customers. 
• Test outsourced technologies regularly throughout their lifecycle. 

It may be useful to create an Accessibility Champions Network to help organise, consult on and participate in accessibility testing. This should be set up in a way that ensures a diverse user test base – for example, people with diverse disabilities, and disabled users with diverse age, gender, racial backgrounds, for example. 

Our resource, ‘Accessibility testing,’ has more information. 

Further information 

• Advice Service – Business Disability Forum Members and Partners can contact our Advice Service for tailored guidance on specific questions. 
• Procurement Toolkit – Available to Business Disability Forum Partner organisations.