How We’re Making Sure Disability Doesn’t Hold Anyone Back At Vodafone

Vodafone’s commitment to accessibility

Accessibility is a key aspect of our diversity strategy that has been developed in partnership between our Technology and Group Diversity & Inclusion departments. We recognised that it was important to consciously respond to the diverse needs of our people and went through an accessibility assessment against the industry-wide standard Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

We then made adjustments to our core employee-facing productivity services such as our corporate Digital Workplace landing page and associated portal framework. The outcome was that all content was easier to read thanks to increased colour contrasts, and that our employees could navigate pages via keyboards, not only with a mouse. We also trained our development teams to implement accessibility by design as standard process, not an afterthought.

Today we have begun the next stage. We are building on the foundation we created and will scale this approach both internally and externally: we want to include our suppliers in our guidance and ensure they treat accessibility compliance with the same due diligence that we do. 

A wholly inclusive workplace includes the digital experience

Since the pandemic, the digital experience has become more important for companies. Many employees actually engage with digital environments more than physical workspaces now. 

Therefore, at Vodafone, we have made sure to adjust all facets of our remote working experience, including transforming employee-facing services like our intranet, internal applications and knowledge portals with appropriate assistive technologies. We inform everyone about the available capabilities so they know what is there to help them should they need it.

I am proud of how accessible we have made Vodafone and I would love to see every company out there take similar action to help build a more inclusive future in general.