Building an accessibility practice at DWP

An accessibility strategy is only as good as the people in the organisation who can deliver it. The research that informed my accessibility strategy for DWP showed we had plenty of people willing to do the work, but we had no dedicated roles, no career path for specialists, and no community holding all of that knowledge together. This case study covers what I did to build that capability, from scratch.

Situation

The strategy’s capability and culture pillars both targeted the same gap. Most of the accessibility knowledge we had lived in a handful of people, who were usually designers or frontend devs. They didn’t really get any recognition for what they were doing, and there was no way to share that knowledge and scale what they knew. When those people left, all the knowledge just left with them.

Task

Build a robust accessibility practice within DWP. Create dedicated accessibility job roles, with proper career paths, and a community of practice that could spread the knowledge across hundreds of product teams.

Action

The first accessibility specialist role

It’s not easy to change anything in government. Particularly when it’s something like job roles, which impact so many areas of the organisation. What’s more challenging is that in Digital, there’s also the Government Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework, which is designed to create consistency of digital job roles right across government. So, if you hire a developer in one department, their knowledge, skills and salary should be closely aligned with all the others. Because of this framework, people are very reluctant to introduce new roles.

However, without a new dedicated role, I knew I’d be in the situation I see many organisations in, where they try to hire an accessibility specialist, under the umbrella of another practice. For example, many organisations hire developers, but bloat the job specification with all their accessibility requirements. This often means you end up trying to recruit unicorns with acorns.

Instead, I worked closely with Human Resources (HR) to create a brand new “Accessibility Specialist” job specification. I used the Government Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework as the scaffolding for it. This meant the roles aligned with other practices in terms of level, grade, skill definitions and terminology. This made the career path clear, for example:

1. Junior Accessibility Specialist
2. Accessibility Specialist
3. Senior Accessibility Specialist
4. Head of Accessibility

After many months of back and forth, paperwork, and countless meetings with various stakeholders, the spec was signed off, the job advert was out, and we were conducting interviews to hire DWP’s first ever Senior Accessibility Specialist.

Nicki Berry was the stand-out candidate, and she started in the department soon after. In my time, I went on to hire several other permanent accessibility specialists at various levels, creating a core central team of seven people, including myself.

When I left, Nicki took on my role as the Head of Accessibility, and has grown the team even further. I was really happy when I heard Nicki was moving up the ladder. She’s awesome and she deserves it. And, as a side effect, it also validated that the framework and the career path I’d carved out were working.

Feeding into the cross-government role

I’d had to create the job spec from scratch, because it didn’t exist in government at the time. However, during my time at DWP, the GOV.UK framework was expanded to add the accessibility specialist role.

I shared all of my work with the working group. This included the job spec, skills matrix and framework, and all of the challenges I had faced along the way. These all helped to inform the cross-government accessibility specialist role in the Government Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework.

I’m really proud to have contributed to this. Work that I started just because I had a problem in DWP ended up helping to define the job spec for the whole of UK government.

A community of practice

Hiring a core team was the first part of the puzzle. But a handful of specialists can’t test everything in an organisation the size of DWP, and they shouldn’t.

I set up a community of practice for the developers, designers and other practitioners who were already acting as accessibility champions in their teams. This gave them a structure, a place to ask questions, and a direct line to our team of specialists.

We’d meet once a month. We’d share knowledge and ideas. People would do short talks on things they’d been learning, or would demo something they’d been working on. We’d support each other, talk through problems, and help each other through the constant challenges of changing the culture around accessibility.

We’d also run accessibility clinics, which were based on design clinics I used to run as a designer. The premise was the same, but accessibility focused. People could bring anything. It could be some code, a prototype, a Figma design, a hand-drawn sketch, or even just a question. It didn’t need to be polished. They just needed to be able to articulate it enough.

The most important point about the clinics is that they were a safe space. They weren’t a governance gateway, and we weren’t there to audit what they had done, or were planning to do. You couldn’t “pass” or “fail” a clinic. It was just a space to discuss things, ask questions, explore ideas, solutions and potential alternatives. Our goal was to support, and help people understand if something they had built, or were planning to build, might have accessibility issues, and how to mitigate them before they became a governance issue.

Accessibility principles

I teamed up with Colin Oakley, and we created five accessibility principles. They were essentially just design principles with an accessibility focus, and were written to complement the GOV.UK Design Principles. They were kept organisation-agnostic, so anyone could reuse them:

1. Inclusion is better than empathy
2. Accessible design is good design
3. Start with what works
4. If it’s not accessible, it’s not done
5. This is still for everyone

These were later published in the DWP Accessibility Manual, where they still help to inform how the department talks about accessibility.

Result

DWP went from having no accessibility roles, to having a recognised specialism with a complete career path, which then went on to be part of the Government Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework.

The department also went from having zero accessibility specialists, and a Head of Accessibility, who was, at least for a short while, “Head of nothing”, to having a core team of seven specialists, and a community of advocates all banging the drum for accessibility.

As the practice matured, the model scaled. Teams and functional areas also started to hire their own permanent accessibility specialists, and bring in contractors. This was when accessibility as a specialism truly became a practice, as we were now coordinating work outside of our immediate team.

The clinics gave people direct time with accessibility specialists, in a dedicated space, where they were safe to ask questions or voice ideas. This really helped change the culture around accessibility, as it went from being a technical black box that frustrated people, to being something they could explore and get curious about.