Accessibility Champions Networks

Accessibility is not the responsibility of one person alone – you need an army to change a culture, and Accessibility Champion Networks are a great way to drive understanding and advocacy across your business.

What are they?

Accessibility Champions Networks are groups of people who feel passionately that their business should be ensuring what they offer to the world is as accessible as possible. They champion accessibility practices in their area, whether that’s engineering, product, content, facilities, or many other areas of an organisation.

These networks can be set up in a variety of ways to suit your sector and business – there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. Here’s what works for us.

Our Accessibility Champions are volunteers who want to make a difference. They come from all areas of the business, contribute different things and have varying levels of knowledge.

Our champions

Every Champion starts at Level 1 after completing a short onboarding process – doing a course on our online learning platform and having a 1:1 with our Accessibility Lead. Champions then move through the ranks as their levels of knowledge and commitment increase.

Level 1 Advocate

We ask that a Level 1 Advocate does the following:

  1. Be the voice of our disabled travellers and employees

  2. Learn more about accessibility

  3. Share knowledge and best practice with their team

  4. Start identifying barriers and work with their team to implement solutions

  5. Be their team's point of contact for accessibility

  6. Help build accessibility into their squad/tribe/team processes

  7. Attend internal Accessibility meetups

Level 2 Contributor

Contributors are Level 1 plus (if applicable):

  1. Educate others in their team or wider

  2. Proactively find and fix issues

  3. Monitor their squad/tribe audit scores

  4. Run usability testing with disabled users

  5. Assist with or run internal a11y events

  6. Contribute to Accessibility Slack channel/newsletter/hub/meetups

  7. Advise others through design reviews/content reviews/audits/testing

  8. Attend external a11y events

Level 3 Expert

We expect Experts to build upon the Level 1 and Level 2 roles, plus:

  1. Share knowledge with wider teams internally

  2. Share knowledge and activity externally

  3. Create documentation for the Accessibility Hub and beyond

  4. Create and deliver training

  5. Gain IAAP certification

Charter and benefits

    1. Your Charter might look different, depending on your business needs. However, as inspiration our Accessibility Champions Network Charter states its purpose to:

    2. Build a strong network of Accessibility Champions

    3. Raise awareness of accessibility internally

    4. Increase adoption of accessibility best practice across the business

    5. Advocate for our disabled travellers and colleagues

    6. Improve the accessibility of our products, marketing, comms and internally

    7. Expand our knowledge and help other Champions grow

    8. Be a source of information, help and advice to others

    9. Embed accessibility into our culture

    1. Improve lives – make a real difference to the lives of those who use your product or service

    2. Increase knowledge – learn and build your skillset

    3. Educate others – increase awareness and share knowledge

    4. Broad collaboration – meet and collaborate with other Champs from many disciplines and locations across the business

    5. Personal growth – build confidence, tackle new areas

    6. Job satisfaction – do something worthwhile while helping shape company-wide change

    7. Recognition – create a reward and recognition structure around accessibility work

    1. Support a company vision, target or strategy

    2. Increase your organisation’s audience – by being accessible, a far wider pool of people can use your product or services

    3. Become a market leader – stand out from your competitors

    4. Build brand equity – improve your reputation by doing something important that’s the right thing to do

    5. Build Employer Brand – attract great talent, proving high standards and empathy

    6. Promote inclusive culture – raise awareness, boost DEI initiatives, promote culture change

    7. Lower legal risk – mitigate legal action, ready for when mandatory

    8. Increase adoption of accessibility – more awareness, building of resources, knowledge share, increased points of contact, upskilled support... all leading to fully embedding into culture

Network structure

We recently moved to a Pod Model, making it easier for Champs to work with others in their own areas, inspire their colleagues, and get more activity off the ground. Each Pod has a Pod Lead, who runs the Pod and also makes up the central “Operations Pod’', which is responsible for running the Network and providing strategic direction.

Our Pods meet up once a month individually, then come together in another monthly meeting for all Champions and anyone else who wishes to attend.

In Pod meetups, our Champs discuss opportunities to improve accessibility in their area and the related activity, which is then summarised at the wider meetup, along with a general update on how the accessibility programme is tracking from our Accessibility Lead. We also invite Champs to demo what they’ve been doing and discuss accessibility topics.

What other say

Find out what other businesses such as the BBC, Google, Intuit, Microsoft and Ubisoft say about their Accessibility Champions Networks, in this report by AbilityNet – Guide: Building an Accessibility Champions Network

Hear from our Champions

We asked Champs from across the business why they’re part of our network. Here’s what they had to say…

"I never want a person to be left behind, as I have, because of a lack of accessibility. So I am passionate about making accessibility a focal part of our engineering and company culture in Skyscanner by being an Accessibility Champion. It allows me to give a voice to those who need them like I once needed."

"We put a lot of thought into how we write code that's readable, maintainable, test it to make sure the code is doing what we want it to do and how that is a must if we want to be good developers. But I think accessibility should be part of that too because only then we are delivering products that can be used by everyone. That is why I am an Accessibility Champion and will always continue to be!"

– Gryff Coates, Software Engineer

– Nensi Dosari,  Software Engineer

"Accessibility is often overlooked by engineers, but seeing the difference we can make when creating accessible features is just as good as fixing a nasty bug. That's why I am an Accessibility Champion."

– Gert-Jan Vercauteren, Senior Mobile Engineer 

"I am a Champion because I believe everybody is deserving of respect and opportunity and the work the Accessibility Champions Network does provides that to our travellers."

– Nicola Beaton, Design Ops

"Designing with accessibility in mind means we are giving better access to Skyscanner products for people with and without disabilities."

– Daniel Gost, Principal Product Designer

Join a global Champions of Accessibility Network!

Created by Gareth Ford Williams, Charlie Turrell and our own Heather Hepburn, the Champions of Accessibility Network (CAN) was set up to support those running or setting up a network, anywhere in the world.

You can join the network on LinkedIn and take part in the conversation in the private group of like-minded people. You’ll also be invited to attend the regular online meetups where members learn from each other, share stories and progress, and meet like-minded people from all over the world.

Read more about CAN in an interview with Heather and Charlie: Introducing the Champions of Accessibility Network.

Again, we should remove the use of Oxford commas.