Shownotes:

"According to the World Health Organisation over a billion people, around the world have some form of disability. And with an ageing population it's estimated that more than 2 billion people will need at least one assistive communication or memory or hearing aid over the next 10 years. And here in the UK, it's expected that around 20% of the population will experience communication difficulty at some point in their lives. From a commercial perspective people with disabilities as a global community, collectively have combined purchasing power more than $8 trillion. So, not only is that a big audience to exclude, it's also an audience that certainly for consumer brands has a significant amount of money to spend" 

For the 25th episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast I spoke with George Coleman, Co-Founder and CEO of Current Global on the recent launch of the 'Accessible Communications guide' in partnership with the PRCA. In the session we spoke about 👇🏾

👉🏾The meaning of inclusive communications; key findings of the survey Current Global commissioned in early 2021; the 'Accessible Communications' guide and why it is important for the PR and Communications Industry; the business imperative or moral imperative; best practice and early adopters

Memorable Passages from the episode:

👉🏾 Put simply inclusive communications means communications that are accessible to everyone. But we see everyday content is published that is inaccessible to many people. Campaigns are launched every day that aren't designed to be inclusive of people of all abilities. And disabilities come in many forms, visible and unseen. For us in the communications industry, the disabilities that we are most concerned with in terms of ensuring our communications can reach them, are those people with visual hearing, cognitive and speech impairments. According to the World Health Organisation over a billion people, around the world have some form of disability, that's a lot. And with an ageing population it's estimated that more than 2 billion people will need at least one assistive communication or memory or hearing aid over the next 10 years. And here in the UK, it's expected that around 20% of the population will experience communication difficulty at some point in their lives.

That's a huge audience to either exclude by default or by design. And also from a commercial perspective people with disabilities as a global community, collectively have combined purchasing power more than $8 trillion. So, not only is that a big audience to exclude, it's also an audience that certainly for consumer brands has a significant amount of money to spend.

👉🏾 So the objective of the survey was to explore the lived experience of how people with disabilities consume media and content online. So through one of our sister agencies in the Interpublic group, we conducted research amongst 800 people in the UK and the US who self-identified that they have impairments and disabilities. And that research is super interesting, it told us that people with disabilities readily consume all forms of content online. Use social media, video content, films, podcasts, audio books, streaming music, you name it. So the type of content and the volume of content they consume is very much in line with the broader population.

👉🏾 And sometimes the preconceptions we might have about what kind of content, someone with a certain kind of disability may consume are often wrong. We found that 98% of people with a visual disability consume visual content at least once a week or more often. We can't presume that a certain type of content is going to be more popular with a certain audience. But the research did reveal that the majority of people with disability do struggle with accessibility. We found that more than half 54%, have to use assistive tools every day. But there's a significant number that would like to have assistive tools, but can't afford them or don't know how to set them up.

👉🏾 So there's immediately a segment of the population that simply don't have the tools that they desperately need, but even when people do have tools and this is super important. So 64% so two-thirds almost of those who do use assistive tools, still report problems consuming content. 34% of those because of the tool itself, the challenges or limitations of using the tool, but 30% because of the content itself, the way the content has been designed, doesn't work with that assistive tool. And this is absolutely the sweet spot of where we as professional communications and brands can make a difference.

👉🏾 It's about how we design the content. How we leverage the tools and the channels more effectively to make sure our campaigns are truly, truly accessible. Of all the different channels and mediums that we looked at, we found that social media was the most problematic. A fifth of the people that we surveyed found that social media platforms either very difficult to access or just challenging full stop. We found that was universally true across all the different categories of disability that we looked at. And because content is hard to consume hard to access for many and it's a very persistent experience, many people with disability have just normalised that. So what they've come to expect and this is what made this research such hard reading is that the level of expectation. But it's just become such an everyday thing that it's, it's just assumed that this is the way that it is.

👉🏾 And emotionally that takes a toll, as you can imagine that 81% of the people that took part in our research said they have negative emotions towards brands when communications aren't accessible. They feel disconnected, they feel less excited about that brand, or they feel that the brand lacks positive qualities it was just unreliable. But there's a very strong, powerful, negative response. Flip that around when brands make content accessible when their communications are truly accessible, the response, the emotional response is overwhelmingly positive, and that leads to a significant rise in brand preference, purchase intent and peer recommendations. So 60% of the people that we spoke to said they would if they saw a brand creating accessible content and communications, 60% would purchase from that brand and recommend it to others. And so really this is for me the crux of it, that not only do we have a moral duty to make sure communications are inclusive of everyone in our society. It makes absolute commercial sense too. We know that that community has significant purchasing spend. And at the same time, when we do a good job of making our communications accessible, we know that they have a preference to spend that money with those brands. So it's both a moral imperative and a commercial one too. 

👉🏾 I think so. We see that brands are starting to pay more attention to accessibility. Part of it may be that our experience over the past year of working remotely, for many of us, we felt the isolation perhaps that many people with disabilities feel every day, when they're excluded from communications.

I think that our context that we found ourselves in has elevated, that understanding or at least willingness to engage in accessibility, in general. You know, I was very encouraged to see when Joe Biden was inaugurated, that they signed and someone took the stand and made her pledge in American sign language, which was just incredible.

Most recently in the Oscars the film, Sound of Metal, which is about progressive hearing loss where the main character suffers progressing hearing loss was up for an Oscar. I don't believe it won, but Google sponsored the event and for the first time ever, it was fully captioned. There were translators in American sign language. Suddenly the Oscars now is starting to pay attention. 

👉🏾 Well, the sort of personal connection for me is my father is deaf and so is his twin brother, my uncle. So from a very earliest age I've grown up in a household where communication was challenging at the best of times. But obviously as families do, you make your best effort to engage and include. So I've been very cognisant as a professional communicator on the need to include everyone in your communications. But I started in PR back in the 1990s back when dinosaurs still stalked the earth and the TV was black and white. And back then the technology didn't exist or if it did cost of making content accessible was pretty high. But fast forward to where we are today. And one of our clients is Microsoft and we were working on a campaign around the accessibility technology, which they've embedded into all the office products and more. And it was at that point, there was this kind of 'aha' moment, this dawning realisation, that all the tools already exist, to make content accessible. So if you think about every modern web browser, it has the ability to convert images into text and to translate that into audio. You look at the office suite of products it's got accessibility checker. A tool that you can hit or should be hitting in the same way that hit spell check when you finished document and it will help identify the problems that you may have in the document and fixes to make it accessible. There's free tools that you can download, for example, to check colour contrast, to make sure your designs in your graphics are accessible for people with visual impairment. So really understanding that all of the tools already exist, the vast majority are free and readily available. It made us realise that actually, what we need to do is really focus on our working practices. 

👉🏾 And in the most part, those are very simple, small changes. It's very incremental things that we need to do. If you're creating richer content like videos, it is a little bit of a heavier lift, but in general 95% of what we do as communicators just requires ever such small changes. And that's really what the guidelines are all about, about how do we make sure that we make everything accessible by design from the very first time we put pen to paper to concept. What a campaign or a piece of content may look like all the way through to delivery and what do we need to do to make it accessible by design.

👉🏾 And so that the guidelines capture that in terms of the best practices, the standards that we should be aware of. How to build that into our workflow and some notes around the tools that we can use. And coming back to social media as a platform. And we know that that's one of the most problematic platforms for people with disability. And the good news is that all the major social media platforms have a suite of accessibility tools. It's just the case that I think that we all too often don't use them. It's so simple to do. So for me, the guidelines sort of point the way of how we can adapt the way that we work, but fundamentally it's about making that commitment. The agency that I run Current Global, has made that commitment and we're hoping others will commit to doing the same. We've actually created a little microsite called https://accessible-communications.com/ which we have published to help instigate change across the industry. We're going to add lots of content resources up there, the PRCA guidelines you can download from there as well as the PRCA website. But we're asking other agencies, in-house teams, to join us and make that same commitment.

It's not a commitment that is going to require years to implement, it's very straightforward. The tools, the guidelines are already there. So we hope other people will sign up and join us too 

👉🏾 I've covered a couple of aspects the sort of moral sense the commercial implications and the benefits of being accessible but I think there's a couple of other dimensions to this that are important. So there's my personal story about growing up in a household with someone who was deaf having that lived experience. I've always felt that if we're communicators and we have a passion for communications, surely we'd want to communicate with everyone and be inclusive of everyone and I think has been a real blind spot in our profession. 

👉🏾 Professionally for our own development, it's critically important. And I also think that when we start to understand how to develop accessible communications by design, from the get-go, we're going to create better campaigns. There's a lot of research that's being done that when workplaces are accessible more often than not, those companies actually perform better than their peers. And we will be better professional communicators if we understand how to make our work more accessible. The second aspect is that we have the power to make disability more visible in the national discourse. The work that we do often lands up on the front page of media. The work that we do, it cuts across the screens of millions and millions of people be that mobile devices or PCs, when they're consuming social media. Imagine if we decided and practically said, actually we want to make sure that disability itself is represented in our work. We could change the way that people start to think about disability in our society in general.

👉🏾 And that will be such a hugely positive change. And it's as simple as thinking about when you're creating any kind of content, what is the representation that I should include of people with disability, be that on an infographic, be that a photoshoot, whatever it is, we need to make sure that people with disability are fairly represented in our work and by our work.

👉🏾 I totally agree and it is incumbent on us to advise the business, not just the comms team about the importance of this. But we're seeing in general, the issue of accessibility rising up the boardroom agenda. For example, that in the public sector accessibility is a key requirement. The EU has very much championed that in terms of the clauses that it's added to all of its tender processes. So, this is something that the business full stop is going to have to address in its many different forms, how it goes about its business, how it looks after its employees, but also how it communicates to the outside world.

And I think people will start to look at that in the round and think about accessibility is encompassing all of those things. And if your communications is your blind spot, then that's going to be problematic 

👉🏾 It's a difficult question to answer because I honestly don't know. My presumption is I think people broadly are aware about discrimination. And the potential implications of that, but I certainly don't think they're aware of the detail of those specifics. And I think that can be challenging. I don't think everyone in your organisation needs to have that granular legal understanding or insight into, the relevant legislation, but organisationally you need to, understand how that frames the way that you act. And the parameters you put in place to protect both yourself and if you're an agency your clients as well. And that's the bit that I think is most pressing. I think there are certain principles that everyone should be applying in their daily work about making sure that it's inclusive which I think is a good step forward. But I think there is probably if we really scratched the surface, probably a worrying lack of understanding across the industry. 

👉🏾 I'd like to say very easy, but the truth is it, requires a bit of focus, as I said before, the tools already exist, they're readily available. The actual changes that you need to make to the way they work are very simple, for example, if you're creating a PowerPoint presentation, it's about adding alt text to images, you know, so the text description of what the image is conveying. So someone with an assisted reader can understand the image is part of the text as well. But the little incremental changes that we need to make. The heavier lift is just changing behaviour. And I said, it's ingrained on us that you finish work, you hit spellcheck because you'd be terribly embarrassed if you sent over a document with typos to the client, right? That would just look bad, that would reflect badly on you as a professional communicator. We need to get to that point that if we send over a document and it's got accessibility areas in it, that we feel the same way that it would reflect badly on us as communicators.

So we need to sort of change the optics, a little bit on behaviours so the way that we work and the changes that we need to make just become natural and very much ingrained. As we hit spellchecker, when we produce a bit of content, we run it through the contrast analyser, those things aren't time-intensive. But you just have to have that as part of your working practices and that's the more challenging aspect to do so when we decided that we wanted to commit to making all of our communication successful and all the work we do for our clients accessible. We rolled out a program to firstly enlist what we called our accessibility champions across all the offices that we have around the world.

👉🏾 So across Europe, across Asia, North America, South America we trained that community on the guidelines. We then went and presented to various different teams, and then really dug into what their workflows were. So especially where we have our production studio teams. That required a bit of re-engineering of the workflow even like our creative team, thinking about how you build a creative brief, what are the implications for making sure you're building in accessibility by design in those briefs. So once you kind of get your arms around, who's going to instigate the change. What are you going to train people on? Then the last part is then what are the workflows or processes we need to update and then hold everyone accountable to that. We have found its being received overwhelmingly positive. 

👉🏾 People haven't sort of led to the, upon this isn't, you know, this is more work. But rather people have just willingly embraced it and we've created an internal dialogue and we're learning from each other constantly. The tools, the technology constantly evolves so it's not something that you can train yourself on and then say right that's it for the rest of my career I know how to do this. It's constant learning all the time and updating yourself and making sure your teams are fully up to date. 

👉🏾 I think the only other thing worth learning is just thinking about the culture aspect within the business and giving people permission to fail, and as you're trying to learn new ways of working new techniques, applying new tools working to standards that you weren't previously aware of people gonna make mistakes, and we had to give permission for people to say, it's okay. You...