Accessibility. What is it? Who does it really serve? And why should businesses care? IBM has been working in some capacity to answer these questions for almost 100 years. For decades, accessibility was associated exclusively with the need to provide physical accommodations to people with disabilities. And while the almost 1 billion people with disabilities worldwide still create a viable business case for accommodation, IBM believes that the impact of accessibility is much broader, creating new opportunities for businesses to increase efficiencies, boost productivity, and reach out to the widest possible range of employees, clients, and prospects.
This belief is based on both our direct experience as an organization and on clear market trends. For example, increasing legislation is requiring businesses worldwide to provide equal access to people with disabilities. In addition, the global population is aging, setting the stage for a host of business challenges, including critical talent shortages, knowledge transfer concerns, and a general lack of experience in targeting and serving a more mature consumer market.
An industry leader with an established history of commitment to diversity and technology innovation, IBM recognized these trends early on and began working to formulate its own strategy to adapt and remain competitive. While IBM has always supported equal employment policies, our initial efforts focused on what we know best: technology. Early innovations included the Model 1403 Braille printer, a talking typewriter for people who were blind, a talking display terminal, and one of the first screen readers to work with graphical user interfaces.
However, as IBM's commitment to removing technology barriers for people with disabilities, the mature population, and other impacted user groups has evolved, so has our approach to accessibility. Today, IBM continues to expand on a broad accessibility initiative that includes all areas of the business, from human resources to product development, sales, and marketing. The knowledge, expertise, and lessons we learn in our own accessibility transformation enable us to both remain at the forefront of our industry, and help our clients devise their own strategies to remain competitive in the face of rapid societal and market changes.
A tops-down commitment
Our integrated approach began in the 1990s with a tops-down commitment to accessibility. In 1998, IBM issued a corporate instruction requiring accessibility to be designed into all products, services, and internal applications. Applying to over 1,000 existing applications, 15,000 internal applications and tools, and more than 26 million internal and external Web pages, this ambitious mandate preceded Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act, which requires federal agencies to make electronic and information technology available to people with disabilities.
Human resources
From a human resources perspective, IBM has consistently shown a commitment to diversity, hiring our first employee with a disability in 1914, 76 years before the Americans with Disabilities Act. However, hiring a person with a disability and creating an environment in which they can be productive are two different things. IBM's end-to-end approach for recruiting, hiring, and retaining employees with disabilities incorporates a host of initiatives, including global accommodations for buildings; Web and workplace resources that enable, encourage, and acknowledge the work of technical leaders with disabilities; management education; and implementation of a cost recovery process that allows managers to redirect the cost of accommodating an employee with a disability to the corporate level. IBM programs such as Entry Point, STEM, and EXITE also provide internship opportunities and camps for young people with disabilities who are interested in a career in science, technology, engineering or math.
Creating an accessible workplace
For an organization with more than 350,000 employees, creating an accessible information technology workplace is no small challenge. IBM facilitates the accessibility of internal applications, Web sites, and rich media by providing an infrastructure that integrates accessibility into core business processes, such as user-centered design, product development, and business management. Auditing and reporting tools, including a "CIO dashboard," offer regular updates on gaps in accessibility and provide business units with reports by project, by page, and by error, giving them an opportunity to make corrections on an ongoing basis.
Making IBM products work for everyone
Facilitating a diverse, accessible workplace is counterproductive if there is no active accessibility plan for the products and services you offer clients. IBM's solution to this challenge was threefold: create an accessibility project office to help drive company-wide product compliance; develop standards and checklists that provide developers with implementation and testing techniques; and provide the right development and testing tools to meet corporate requirements. This approach reduces the long-term cost of development by integrating accessibility on the front end of our development process, and differentiates IBM products in the marketplace.
Procuring accessible solutions
While making existing technology accessible is important, an overall accessibility initiative can fall apart if there is no proactive approach to controlling the new hardware and software that is added to the environment. To address this issue, IBM developed standard contract language that strongly encourages the accessibility of third-party applications. IBM assists vendors in meeting this requirement by making accessibility testing information available for use in product development. The contract language and the testing information enable us to both influence the accessibility of vendor applications and create a network of vendors and partners that understand the importance of accessibility.
Marketing: Sending the right message
Marketing is all about the "message." But presentations, collateral, and Web and rich-media content that cannot be accessed by prospects, clients, and other stakeholders can undermine an accessibility initiative and impact brand perception. For this reason, IBM's content governance board includes accessibility as a requirement for each deliverable type, and IBM offers specialized training for internal marketing and agency marketing professionals. The training is held by teleconference making education easy and convenient. Accessibility subject matter experts are available for ongoing questions.
Supporting sales
For business units like sales, accessibility education is critical. Client-facing divisions of any organization must not only understand how to communicate the business value of accessibility, but help clients realize those benefits. To ensure that IBM sales teams have the tools they need to succeed with accessibility in a client environment, IBM offers sales-specific training as well as a wide range of accessibility-related resources including, a proposal center, videos, case studies, testimonials, and a resource-rich intranet site with a section dedicated to ongoing sales education.
Ultimately, even at IBM, accessibility is still about access. But today it's about more than simply adding ramps or widening aisles to accommodate wheelchairs. It's bigger than proximal parking spaces or closed captioning. It's about creating a "culture of accommodation" that enables all people to operate at their fullest potential. It clearly benefits people with disabilities, mature people, and non-native language speakers. But implemented properly, it has the potential to benefit everyone. And IBM believes that's just good business.