About These Guides

About these guides

We understand that while there can be common aspects, organisations work in different ways and what works for one, might not fit so well with another. These guides are written as an example of what best practice might look like in your organisation, but it may be that you have to adjust what is recommended to accommodate your particular circumstances.

Similarly the guides do not include detailed technical information as this would tie them to a specific technology or set of circumstances.Instead the guides convey important principals and approaches that can be applied in any industry and using any technology.Where appropriate the guides reference other sites and resources which contain more technical detail at the time of publication/last review.

Introduction

Organisations are legally required to produce accessible IT systems and provide reasonable adjustments to staff, but the practicalities of funding can cause problems. As with any other area of IT, funding needs to be thought out and managed.

This document has been produced to help organisations consider the different types of activity that need to be funded, and hence to make arrangements for budgets to be identified and managed.

Note that this guide only deals with Information and Communications Technology (ICT) accessibility, not the adjustments necessary to premises or business processes to make the physical environment accessible.

Authors:Sean Smith OBE, HMRC

Contributors:Paul Smyth, Barclays, Neil Milliken, Atos

Editors:Lucy Ruck and Bela Gor

Accessibility Areas and Funding

There are different aspects of accessibility that might or will incur cost. Some are obvious, others less so. They are:

Reasonable Adjustments for staff – Assistive Technology, which includes specialist hardware, software, telephony (e.g. specialist mobile phones, induction-loop phones), and PC changes (e.g. laptops / broadband for staff working at home).
Reasonable Adjustments for offices – Assistive Technology might also be needed in specific locations rather than for specific staff. Examples include PCs and software in training or exam rooms, T Loop systems in conference venues or public offices.
Installation and set up of these tools – On the whole these are self evident but unusual cases can arise, e.g. installing CCTV systems for visually impaired users or systems to connect hearing aids with telephony.
Subsequent training of the users in how to use these products.
Ongoing technical support. This includes ongoing maintenance, repair and eventual replacement of such equipment and their accessories e.g. light bulbs for CCTV systems, toner cartridges for dedicated printers. These issues sound trivial but can become major problems, particularly for visually impaired staff or those with limited arm mobility.
Initial product selection and testing prior to allowing products to be used within an organisation’s IT estate. This can include finding replacements for products that have reached end of life. Keeping an up to date catalogue of products available and approved for use in the organisation is good practice as having to find products in response to an assessed need can greatly delay delivery to the user.
Developing and providing expertise in accessibility standards and system design best practice, including the trained personnel to help advise IT projects and procurements in flight, such as where accessibility issues are identified during system development.
Developing and providing expertise in accessibility testing, including the trained personnel to help administer this testing.
Addressing accessibility issues in legacy systems.
Providing the resource to help with the wider aspects of an organisation’s IT Accessibility Policy: awareness training, staff and customer liaison (feedback, disability networks, mentoring groups), strategy management (business objectives planning, reporting to the IT Accessibility Champion), etc.

Budget Management

Accessible Systems

There are two possible approaches to funding accessibility in IT projects – i.e. creation and maintenance of standards and expertise, their application in the various stages of projects and procurements, accessibility testing, fixing of faults identified, and remedial work. They are:

A centralised budget provided to cover all these items.
Expecting such costs to be factored into projects from the outset, as just another cost (and discipline) that needs to be addressed.

Projects and system owners might favour the first. The advantage of the second is that it puts the onus on the project to ‘get it right’ from the start and hence save money overall. The disadvantage is that, when money is tight, projects and owners may be tempted to accept systems with accessibility flaws. Ultimately therefore this is a question of IT Accessibility Strategy and the solution must be one that suits the organisation’s circumstances.

The above applies to both new systems and amendments to existing systems. The latter in turn raises issues of degree. It makes sense to treat a major rewrite as if it were a new system development. At the other extreme, a change to a just small part of an older, inaccessible system may not be worth investing in if the result is that that system remains inaccessible overall. This is always a question of judgement.

Finding money to address legacy system issues can be problematic for all disciplines, not just disability. Again there are two broad generic approaches:

Setting up a dedicated fund
Taking an approach that such faults will only be addressed when these systems are renewed.

Again this is a question of judgement, strategy, and available budget. The second approach allows resources to be focussed on new builds and hence ‘stops the accessibility problem getting worse’ for an organisation. The first allows issues with key systems to be addressed. Either way, the recommended approach is to:

Conduct an initial survey of key systems to assess the scale of the problem.
Ensure that the owners of each system are on board, and take responsibility for issues found with their systems. This might mean that a record of such issues is kept so that they can be factored into future work and a long term plan can be put in place. Also it allows temporary measures to be put in place for users affected e.g. workarounds, JAWS and / or Dragon scripts, reasonable adjustments, use of managers or other staff to support disabled staff or customers.

Reasonable Adjustments

Staff may need a range of reasonable adjustments, following recommendations from appropriate assessments. As with projects, there are two broad approaches:

Centralised budgets for specialist hardware and software, training, ongoing support.
Expecting such costs to be covered by individual business units e.g. the home business unit of the member of staff concerned.

Many organisations distribute budgets to specific business units to assist with assessing profitability, true costs per unit etc. If so, this may not be a decision open to an IT Accessibility Champion. There is a distinct advantage for the second approach however. Experience shows that funding decisions can greatly slow down the reasonable adjustment process. Recommendations may be clear and received early on but take months to implement while managers try to agree ‘who pays?’ and ‘should we pay?’ The second approach has two other advantages:

It allows the overall spend on IT Accessibility to be monitored as a strategic organisational cost so that the Champion can report to the board on what the organisation is spending as a total, as a percentage of its overall IT budget, spend against target, sudden increases and decreases in spend etc.
It can form a close link with the organisation’s reasonable adjustment process to follow a policy that equipment recommended in a specialist’s assessment will always be supplied, and that equipment will only be supplied following such an assessment. There will be no temptation for a manager under budgetary pressure to resist the provision of necessary equipment, or the inclusion of someone with accessibility needs in their team. That addresses the ‘should we pay?’ question in all but the most extreme cases at a policy level.

The question of ownership of equipment also arises. If a member of staff moves within a business, or leaves the business, can they take their equipment with them? Can they do this only where such equipment cannot be recycled? Can they do this if funding has been obtained from Access to Work?

In addition, are they allowed to use any specialist products provided to them outside of work? Most organisations might not allow this but may consider exceptions. An example might be allowing JAWS users to take their dongles home (the licence is on the dongle). This allows them to use JAWS at home and hence increase their expertise which of course has benefits at work, while costing the employer nothing.

Conclusion

Arranging accessibility funding requires decisions on how proactive the organisation intends to be.

Will there be a policy of fixing system issues immediately, or will the fixes await an update or improvement to the system concerned?
Will the organisation have a pre-arranged list of ‘approved’ products which can be supplied at short notice, or will they institute a policy of looking at the equipment on the market at the time a need arises?
A mixed regime of proactive and reactive elements is also a possibility, as long as the areas in which each element applies has been decided and recorded in advance.

Whichever option is chosen, the decision-making authority must be made clear in internal guidance – whether an employee’s line manager can authorise reasonable adjustments, for example, or whether it is up to an HR team.

The final decision must be made at a strategic level. Taking into account the advantages listed above, is funding to be paid from an organisational cost-centre, or at a project level?

For further information about best practice and reasonable adjustment, please see also available to download from the website

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Appendix A – Glossary

Assistive Technology / Items designed to make IT usable by people with specialist needs. Can include hardware (large-key keyboards, specialist mice), software (screen readers and/or magnifiers, voice recognition technology, dyslexia assistance), specialised telephones, etc.
CCTV / Closed-circuit television. In this document, the term refers to a vertically-aligned desktop-mounted system to enable a user to see a document magnified when put into the field of view.
Dongle / A small device which plugs into a computer’s USB port. In this document, it refers to one on which the licence and software for JAWS is hard-coded, effectively installing JAWS on any device it is plugged into without taking up its memory.
Dragon / Dragon Naturally Speaking, voice recognition software which allows the user to dictate text and control the computer through voice input.
IT, ICT / Information Technology, Information & Communication Technology
JAWS / Job Access With Speech, a screen reading programme for visually impaired people.
Legacy systems / An organisation’s systems as they are at the start of the Accessibility assessment/improvement process.
PCs / Personal Computers. In the context of this document, the term should be understood to mean Macs, laptops, tablets, and smartphones as well as IBM-style ‘PCs’.
T Loop / A specialised circuit (telecoil – hence T loop) within hearing aids. It is a small coil of wire designed to pick up magnetic signals. When a telecoil is activated the hearing aid’s normal microphone is turned off and it only picks up magnetic inputs. The hearing aid converts the magnetic signal to sound. No other sounds in the environment are amplified, so the hearing aid user can focus on the magnetic inputs. These magnetic inputs are sounds created by hearing aid compatible phones as well as broadcasting devices such as induction loops in theatres/cinemas.