This week I facilitated my first collaborative Accessibility and Digital Inclusion workshop alongside Kevin Chorley, with colleagues from the Service Design and Change team. The aim was simple; to better understand how our teams can work together to reduce the risk of exclusion in project delivery.
With the pressures created by the Best Value Notice the timing felt important – projects across the organisation are likely to happen at pace, and where a sudden shift to speed and efficiency is necessary, the risk of digital inclusion being checked too late, or not at all, increases. This creates a risk of exclusion becoming baked into decisions before anyone has had the opportunity to challenge assumptions or validate them with users, but this risk can be reduced if we work together.
Kevin and I also wanted to gain a better understanding of the team’s processes, pressures and ways of working so that we can identify where our expertise is genuinely useful rather than making assumptions ourselves.
This session was my first opportunity to design and facilitate a workshop based around collaboration rather than training. I have delivered plenty of accessibility training sessions before, but this felt different. Instead of holding focus and sharing knowledge, my role here was to create space for discussion and help the group work towards a shared outcome.
Starting with assumptions
The workshop opened with an activity designed to challenge perceptions of scale. One statistic we discussed was that around 2.2 million adults nationally are entirely offline, the group was asked to guess how many Somerset residents this converts to. While this number is “only” 3.2% it represents more than 18,000 people in Somerset. Similarly, around 68,000 Somerset residents may lack basic digital skills.
The purpose was not to overwhelm people with numbers, but to demonstrate how seemingly small percentages can represent significant numbers of real people experiencing exclusion.
From there, we explored common assumptions, and the groups of people they are often associated with.
Some of the examples discussed touched on common beliefs such as “most people are digitally literate” or “people simply prefer to do things the old way”. In the context of the demographic data it becomes easier to surface the groups of people who would be missed by these assumptions. Someone who struggles with a digital process may be experiencing barriers that are not immediately visible, whether that is digital confidence, connectivity, financial circumstances or accessibility needs.
This felt like an important starting point because assumptions made during discovery often become decisions later in delivery.
Mapping inclusion into project processes
The core of the workshop focused on understanding project lifecycles and identifying trigger points where accessibility and digital inclusion should be considered. It was interesting to see how similar many of the underlying project principles were to the approaches used elsewhere in Digital Transformation. The terminology varied, but discussions around diagnosis, delivery, improvement, user needs, problem statements and validation felt very familiar.
As the conversation developed, a number of possible trigger points emerged:
- Equality Impact Assessments (EIAs)
- user stories and personas
- problem statements
- data focused decision making
- user journey mapping
- user research and testing
- procurement activities
- accessibility auditing
- continuous improvement
What I found encouraging was that nobody appeared to be viewing accessibility as a final compliance check. The discussion naturally moved towards the idea of accessibility being embedded throughout delivery rather than applied at the end. For example, viewing EIAs as living documents rather than one-off forms. Instead of completing them and moving on, we discussed the possibility of using them as continuous validation tools throughout project delivery.
What I learned as a facilitator
Overall I feel it was a successful workshop, but in the spirit of test and learn I came away with plenty of learning points.
The biggest lesson was the importance of being explicit about outcomes. There were moments where participants understood the topic being discussed but were less certain about the output I was asking them to create. Looking back, I can see opportunities to be more specific about the purpose of each activity and clearer about exactly what success looks like for each exercise.
I also learned that every group contains a range of different dynamics. Some participants naturally verbalised their thinking and helped drive discussion, others contributed valuable ideas through the whiteboard activities. In future sessions I would like to build in more time to read and acknowledge written contributions so those voices can be heard.
One thing I was pleased with was the structure. Although we were a little short on time, each exercise built on the one before it and helped move the discussion from assumptions, to processes, to collaboration, which allowed the workshop to generate useful outputs.
Reflections
If there is one thing I took away from the workshop, it is the importance that digital inclusion and accessibility tasks do not happen in isolation. Audits, checklists, impact assessments and research activities are all important, but it is the combination of them embedded across multiple workstreams that leads to positive outcomes: Digital inclusion is an ecosystem.
It requires a network of conversations, evidence, validation, challenge, learning and collaboration that stretches across the entire lifecycle of a project. Remove one part of that ecosystem and the risk of exclusion increases.
The workshop also reinforced something I have been thinking about for some time: many accessibility challenges are not really “accessibility” challenges at all: They are challenges in cross-team communication, organisational governance, user research resources and process pressures.
The encouraging part is that those are challenges we can solve together. For me, this workshop felt like the beginning of an ongoing partnership between teams who share the same goal: designing services that work for as many people as possible.
