Our accessibility journey

A few years ago, we hadn’t thought much about accessibility. But one person planted the seed and today it’s part of our company strategy – supported by a network of Accessibility Champions and Heather, our Accessibility Lead.

Accessibility has become integrated across our teams and we’ve made public commitments to improving our disability thinking.

How we started

Our accessibility journey started because, while we didn’t intend to exclude people from our product, we simply didn’t realise we were doing it.

Heather’s first move was to build awareness and understanding of what we were lacking. She ran sessions with disabled travellers to bring their challenges to life and identify Skyscanner’s biggest problems, while ‘Empathy Labs’ simulated accessibility challenges for employees as they tried to undertake tasks they’d previously taken for granted.

Our Getting Started section will help you do the same.

Progress

A lot has happened since then. We’re members of the Valuable 500 and co-founders of the external Champions of Accessibility Network (CAN). We have training, processes, and measurement in place. Our Accessibility Champions Network has grown and now includes employees from design, engineering, content, product, marketing, social, corporate affairs, to name just a few.

We have a programme of internal education, we include disabled travellers in usability testing. We measure ourselves against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and AbilityNet’s Digital Accessibility Maturity Model.

Importantly, accessibility is now part of our Production Standards and we’re embedding it into our product development processes to try to make what we create accessible from the outset.

Champions of Accessibility Network logo
The Valuable 500 logo

Our current focus

    1. Build a11y capability into our design system and all product development processes across the business

    2. Create more accessible products while also improving our existing product offering to disabled travellers

    3. Build a flagship of inclusion through education, where all our disabled employees feel they truly belong

    4. Grow our Accessibility Champions Network

    1. Build a more inclusive, accessible brand, with inclusive imagery, content and copy

    2. Advocate for accessibility both internally and externally

    3. Promote accessible travel throughout our owned channels

    1. Understand where the issues lie in our products by ensuring we have rigorous accessibility data

    2. Continue to measure and track our digital accessibility maturity

    1. Help our Partners to understand the issues disabled travellers face, and share the learnings from our journey (through this site and more!)

    2. Improve the accessibility of our partner portal and site