Q’s journey to becoming inclusive and accessible

Over 2021–22 we began efforts to to build team confidence in understanding, addressing and discussing issues of inequality in our work. Starting this during the pandemic was both a driver as well as a challenge, as inequities in health and care were pushed into sharp focus, while the system faced exceptional pressures. 

From our progress so far, one of the most important lessons for us has been that embedding accessibility and inclusion in your work is not a set destination, but a continual learning journey. Viewing our work through this lens is crucial to support a purposeful community and our collective work towards a shared goal.

In recognising that there were lots of ways we could be doing better, we also saw lots of opportunities to improve. Although we still have much to do, we wanted to share some examples of our work so far, both the challenges and the successes, in the hopes that it might be helpful to others on a similar journey. 

There’s no better time to consider inclusion and accessibility in your work than at the start of a project. As part of our efforts to more purposefully integrate equality into our work, we have introduced Equality Impact Assessments (EIAs) to our project planning.

EIAs are a tool designed to help ensure an organisation’s policies, practices and decisions are fair and do not discriminate against or present barriers to protected groups. They encourage you to consider the people involved, the activity being undertaken and the potential impacts it may have. Originally, we explored them as a tool specifically for evaluation and insight, but quickly realised they can be used in any project planning context.

Implementing this has come with some valuable ​‘penny drop’ moments. For example, an EIA is recommended when a project or offer is ​‘relevant to equality’ but this can be hard to determine. Your project may not explicitly focus on inequalities, but it could be valuable to reflect on, for example, your approach to participation or any resources you create by using the EIA. With this in mind, we agreed all projects or offers may potentially have an impact on equality. And though an EIA template is a great starting point, we realised quickly that it often didn’t fit the context to which we were applying it. One adaptation we made was to shift the language from referring to policies or services, to ​‘projects, offers or events’, a small change that made a big difference to usability.

As a community of thousands across the UK and Ireland, our website is an important tool for enabling connection and collaboration online. When we set about designing and delivering a new website, we knew it was a non-negotiable to have the needs of the community at its heart.

Co-design is part of our very fabric, Q was co-designed back in 2015 with 231 members, and one of the most important aspects of this process is to remain open to having our assumptions challenged. We built the design process to ensure that Q members, partners and other stakeholders were a key part of development. We used audience research with senior leaders and a member co-design group to design the site with the people who use it.

We wanted to build a platform that supports cross-sector connections for learning, allows all members to find support and ideas, and shows how to bring improvement into practice. Through the research and testing, we were able to prioritise the things that people told us were important, ensuring that barriers to participation on the previous website were removed, changed or reimagined. It’s now much easier to navigate information, access resources, and connect with others, regardless of whether you have technical expertise. 

By centring the needs of our community, we created a space that provides a more personal and intuitive experience. And we’re looking forward to settling into a process where we continue to learn, iterate and improve based on what we’re hearing from people using the site.

Events, both virtual and in-person are an important means for people to come together and share learning and insight. And we acknowledge that when bringing people together, we have an obligation to make it as accessible as possible.

We were very fortunate to be able to enlist the support of Leonard Cheshire, a charity that supports disabled people, as consultants to review our approach to events. What followed was a very honest look at how we plan and deliver events, and an incredibly rich learning experience on how we could improve.

We undertook a document and process review alongside some focus groups. One focus group was with disabled people who have attended our events and the others included a range of staff across the Foundation working on events or in other supporting roles. The findings were condensed into a report identifying areas for improvement. From the changes we could make immediately, to those that will take some planning, we’ve started to embed some of these in our work.

Some of the changes include:

• Providing more information up front for attendees and clearly communicating what accessibility features are already in place 
• Including alternative ways to get in touch – phone and email address 
• Standardising the use of AI captions across online events and trialling them at in-person events
• Undertaking a recce for all venues we book, using an accessible venue checklist (we have linked this for you to download at the end of the blog)

And we’re always open to feedback, if you have thoughts you’d like to share on your experience of our events, let us know!

Through this work and the resulting changes we’ve implemented, we have found that a key part of achieving progress is by maintaining your commitment to it. Understanding that there is value not only in the outcomes but also in the learning process is key. We have plenty more to do and are excited to find new opportunities for change and progress.

We look forward to continuing this work, seeing where it takes us and finding new ways to improve and sharing our work.