Lucy Ruck, Business Disability Forum’s Technology Taskforce lead, tells us how our new free Technology Toolkit can support you.
Technology can be a vital tool in increasing productivity and making your products and services more accessible for everyone, but particularly disabled employees and customers. But tech introduced in isolation, without first considering the needs of disabled people or an organisation’s wider systems, can create barriers and much time-consuming retrofitting.
This is why we are delighted to be able to share Business Disability Forum’s new Technology Toolkit. If you work in accessibility, or just have an interest in making technology work for everyone, this free toolkit is for you.
The Toolkit contains many of the most popular resources created by our Technology Taskforce, including our Accessibility Maturity Model (AMM), as well as plenty of new content created by disabled people and accessibility experts. This includes resources on new and emerging technologies and AI and a whole new section on technology and adjustments.
We also include some great examples of how you can embed accessibility within your business as usual. From thinking about how you engage with senior sponsors to get buy-in, to accessibility testing, to where to get your accessibility training, and more. There is also a helpful and practical section dedicated to procuring accessible technology – an area which we know many people want to improve on.
The content is organised in a clear structure to make it easy to navigate. And each section begins with a short video, to give you a flavour of what you will find inside.
The sections are:
- Inclusive technology strategy,
- Assistive technology,
- Everyday technology,
- Adjustments for employees and customers,
- Technology procurement,
- Accessibility standards and training.
At Business Disability Forum, we often get asked why we should design accessible technologies and solutions for such a niche group of people. Our response is: why would we want to exclude anyone? So don’t think of it as a niche project, think about it as inclusion, and making things work better for everyone.
If you work in tech, you may already know how difficult it can be to retrofit a change of requirements once you have a tech solution in place, not to mention the cost (up to 100 times more than if you’d included them at the start), so imagine the difference it makes if you think about accessibility and inclusion from the beginning of the process, and make sure everyone is included.
Please do spread the word about the toolkit and share this on your social media channels, so that everyone can benefit from accessible technology.
Go to our Technology Toolkit page to find out more.
