Our strategy

Delivering accessibility requires a strategy, which will be different for every business, but the main elements and goals are the same.

Our accessibility vision

To make Skyscanner a flagship of inclusion, our products accessible to all, and travel easier for people with disabilities.

This can be broken down into 3 sections:

  1. “Flagship of disability inclusion” is about our people – what improvements can we make internally to help our disabled employees thrive.

  2. “Products accessible to all” is about our travellers – how can we make our products able to be used by everyone

  3. “Travel easier for people with disabilities” is about our industry – how can we help our partners become more accessible too, so the whole traveller experience improves

How we deliver our vision

We first heard of this simple accessibility strategy through Sam Solomon from Verizon Media, and have been following it ever since!

  1. Raise awareness of accessibility and inclusive design across the business

  2. Increase adoption of accessibility best practices throughout the product development process

  3. Improve advocacy for disability inclusion internally and externally

What does it look like in practice?

  • We’ve achieved a lot in a short period! We’ve been:

    1. building an internal e-learning module for employees, delivering face to face training, plus rolling out an online training programme to Accessibility Champions

    2. creating an internal Accessibility Hub full of helpful resources, which is growing day by day

    3. running Empathy Labs across many of our offices and for every new cohort of employees at our Global Induction events

    4. celebrating Global Accessibility Awareness Day annually with talks from well known disabled advocates, blogs, and training sessions

  • This is hard to do and takes time. We’ve been:

    1. getting Designers to consider accessibility from initial concept design, and add accessibility annotations to their design specifications

    2. embedding accessibility into our build processes and Production Standards

    3. making our Design System components accessible

    4. regularly auditing our products to understand where we are today, how much we have to do, and what to focus on

    5. carrying our usability tests with disabled travellers

  • Internally, we’ve been:

    1. growing an active internal accessibility Slack channel

    2. nurturing an engaged Accessibility Champions Network, who attend regular meet-ups and work together in discipline-specific pods

    3. encouraging Accessibility Champions to talk to their teams about accessibility to get others interested and involved

    4. talking about accessibility in company-wide meetings, at any opportunity!

    External advocacy has been done through:

    1. commissioning photography showing disabled people enjoying travel across the world

    2. including illustrations of disabled people in our artwork

    3. hosting Instagram Lives with disabled travellers

    4. sharing our experiences externally on podcasts, at conferences and with other businesses

    More widely, we are:

    1. proudly members of The Valuable 500 and publicly committing to improving disability inclusion

    2. co-founders of the external global Champions of Accessibility Network (CAN)

Looking forward, our strategy means we’ll…

  • We’re committing to continuing to build a11y capability into our Design System and product development processes. We’re excited to create more accessible products while also improving our existing product offering to disabled travellers, and ultimately hope to build a flagship of inclusion through education, where all our disabled employees feel they truly belong. We’re also keen to grow our Accessibility Champions Network in size and skill levels.

  • Data is key in helping us to understand where the issues lie in our offering, which we’ll continue to track through testing, auditing, and talking to disabled travellers. We’ll also continue to measure and track our digital accessibility maturity. Check out the Digital Accessibility Maturity Model created by AbilityNet, who have both self-serve and guided offerings.

  • As a global business, we’re fortunate to have an audience of millions – whether that’s partners, travellers or our people. So we’ll continue to build a more accessible brand, with inclusive imagery, content and copy, advocate both internally and externally, and help the partners we work with understand the issues disabled travellers face. We’re not perfect – our partner portal is currently being worked on to improve accessibility for example – but we’re all on a journey, and we’re keen to share our learnings where we can.