“We shape our tools and then the tools shape us”, Marshall McLuhan said. Indeed, we’ve shaped our accessibility practice a lot in the past 3 years. Now, it guides how we develop services.
On Thursday, all things came together on a single office wall: We opened the first version of our accessibility awareness and testing lab.
Making our accessibility work tangible
Exactly 3 years ago, my colleague Nadine Stammen kicked off our internal pizza-powered accessibility checks. It marked the starting point for people from all disciplines getting together for pizza and testing things currently in development. We find issues and improve things together. We experience how frustrating it can be to use a service when the mouse cursor wobbles, long sentences blur in front of you, or the keyboard cannot reach a particular part of a page. The checks are highly educational for everyone involved. We continue to run these checks every so often. Most recently, Nadine ran one in April to test our new open data justice platform.
Utilising the GOV.UK accessibility personas, we found setting up their testing profiles a bit cumbersome. So, Joshua took action and developed a handy Chrome extension. It helps us run our accessibility checks more smoothly and more often. More frequent testing is good. Launched on the Chrome Web Store, it now has over 100 users around the globe and a 5-star rating.
For Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), we hosted an in-person meetup. My colleagues David, Marion, Robert and I used that momentum and rushed to cobble a little lab space together.
So far, it does the following:
- it tells you facts about the occurrence of disabilities in the population
- it prompts you to a single page that includes all of our accessibility tools, which we also launched yesterday
- it introduces you to all 7 GOV.UK accessibility personas and gives you for each 2 things to look when testing with them
- it is the home for a locked testing laptop that has our homegrown Simulating accessibility personas Chrome extension installed and invites you to use assistive tech tools like screen reader JAWS
- it has several simulation glasses that let you experience specific eye conditions
The wall includes stats on the occurrence of various disabilities in the population of Germany. It’s data we also use in our ‘Wie viele Menschen?’ tool we developed last year, inspired by @andyjones.bsky.social’s team’s work ‘How many people?’. digitalservice.bund.de/wie-viele-me… 3/X
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) May 16, 2025 at 4:40 PM
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The wall design is complementary to the tools we have developed. It shows selective stats from the ‘Wie viele Menschen?’ tool. It also introduces visitors to the personas that people can simulate in the Chrome extension. A sheet contains a QR code that lets one quickly access these tools and find guidance on running tests. The accessibility page we created will grow and evolve in the coming days and weeks. At the bottom, it lists all past and upcoming accessibility-related events we are involved in.
Designing the wall throughout the week was fun. Last week, I had a vague idea of what it might include and how it might look. One evening of focus got me on track. I sourced coloured A3 sheets from nearby printers, purchased plot foil in our matching blue and designed the simple stat sheets overlaid with Daphne’s icons.
The benchmark was GDS’s original accessibility empathy lab , which Al Duggins and the team built, and Stephen McCarthy designed the wall graphics. I am planning to extend the equipment beyond the laptop with simulation software and some simulation goggles. When time allows, I hope to visit Google’s Accessibility Discovery Centre in Munich to learn how they are equipped.
I hope visitors stop by and take a seat in front of the wall. We should also make a visit part of the accessibility onboarding training.
Running accessibility events on Global Accessibility Awareness Day
Right after finishing the little lab setup, 2 events followed one after the other.
First, we ran an international call with 49 participants from around the world. We heard from 4 speakers in 3 talks. My colleagues Christop and Marion started by reporting what structures, formats, and accessibility culture we have established at Digital Service. Priyanca spoke about intersectionality and inclusive research in the UK. Hidde discussed web standards and their role in built-in accessibility.
Happy #GAAD reminder for later today: Our int’l #GovDesign call #36 on #accessibility & #inclusion starts at 3:30 pm BST 🌍 4:30 pm CEST 🌍 10:30 am EDT 🌎 7:30 am PDT 🌎 —you’ll hear from @hidde.blog, @priyanca.bsky.social, and my @digitalservice.bund.de colleagues Christoph Schmidl & Marion Couesnon
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) May 15, 2025 at 1:18 PM
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As always, we recorded the call and will make it available to all 4,000+ community members. If all speakers agree, we can also publish it openly for everyone on the internet. I will check with them.
While wrapping up the call, attendees of our 10th local, in-person meetup started arriving. Eventually, we had some 45 people in the office to discuss ‘Accessible for everyone‘, the theme of the event. Tying into GAAD, it attracted many new people to our event. Again, about 80% of attendees had not joined a previous edition.
We heard from German Railway colleague Danny Koppenhagen about ‘guiding sightless journeys’ and how Deutsche Bahn assists visually impaired travellers to stops. My colleagues, accessibility designer Marion and content designer Sue, offered a deep dive into the work on the court claims service. They focused on accessibility broadly and demonstrated the role accessible content plays in it. The participants had dozens of questions for all speakers, which everyone enjoyed.
Poster for tomorrow‘s #GAAD meetup is printed and informing people in the office
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) May 14, 2025 at 10:12 AM
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The poster I designed for the event was well received, both on the internet and in the internal Slack. Various people messaged me about how much they liked the design.
The event received two 4-star and three 5-star ratings on meetup.com, keeping the overall event series rating at 4.8.
Talking to people about their work
Throughout the week, I did 5 candidate interviews for our open roles in the open justice data space. Once again, we attracted great candidates. My colleagues started running the subsequent interview round with deep dives.
Working towards the annual salary cycle and performance reviews, I had various feedback conversations and participated in alignment workshops.
What’s next
Next week, I will do more candidate interviews.
On Monday, we will have an expert interview with the GOV.UK folks in charge of domain registration and management. Lena and I will lead the interview, which I am looking forward to. We also reached out to our US colleagues, and they also kindly agreed to talk about the work they have done on get.gov.
On Friday, Viktoria from HMCTS and I will host the Amsterdam post-conference webinar.